Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper
They always talk about that, ay? That pitter-patter of little feet and what it means for the happiness of families. Each of them a little bundle of joy. A trouble that’s a little one. Every goddamn cliché you can imagine all packed into a 3 by 2 crib and stuck mewling and crying in a room to look at a over-priced mobile and a ceiling of ‘ivory’.
It’s at that age that you can’t imagine them doing all those things they’ll end up doing to embarrass you, to bankrupt you, to keep you up till 3am wondering. Well… what am I saying… of course you can imagine it, I’m imagining it right now, aren’t I? But it’s all the bullshit I got up to that I’m repeating. So at worse the best I can think is, don’t be the same kind of little bastard I was…
And it’s when you flip that one on it’s head that it starts to get more relevance. We’re each of us nothing but trouble to our parents, and they were nothing but trouble to theirs in return. It’s an endless cycle of pissed-off old people and semi- or irresponsible youth. But like I say, flip it on its head and take a look at it. What happens when we’re the ones who suffer at the hands of our parents? What happens when we’re the ones loaded down with responsibility, the ones who are worried to death about what they’re up to? What it is to be a 5-year-old kid standing in the doorway while some fucker slaps a patch of blood the size of your helpless fists out of your mother into a stain on the fridge you just came to get juice from? What then?
What am I asking?! I hear you ask. What am I trying to coax out of you while you sit slightly stunned thinking you were going to be reading a missive on parenthood? Hmmm? I’m asking what you do to cope with a history unfolding in front of you, falling in front of you, a history ordained by fate and written on the leaves of a book made of pointless, meaningless dollar bills.
And I ask this because I can still see it like it was yesterday.
I’m standing in a paddock, with the blue skies reaching from horizon to horizon. The grass underneath my feet and stretching out towards the rugby club in the distance is winters green, and the air crisp, prickly. My breath is coming in ragged, rough gasps because I’ve been running, and my best mate is yelling, screaming, “Tell him!! Just fuckin’ tell him!!”
The fences around us are there to keep in stock we’ve never seen, and they’re falling slowly into disrepair. They’re 50 feet from us and they’re a weathered grey of the kind you only seen in old farmland. The wire is slack on most.
There’s a seagull squawking, and flapping about above us somewhere.
And I’m 7 years old.
And I’m holding a knife to the throat of another child.
* * *
Fate is, after all, and extremely funny thing, isn’t it? Not funny ha hah ay, but funny like quirky, weirdness in your life. We can each map out our futures and stride towards them, but fate will always manoeuvre us towards something it wants us to experience. Not that I’m a fatalist mind you. We all have choices and those choices are effected by us. But if that fate has put you in a situation where you’re looking into the eyes of a terrified kid then… you’re probably not making the right choices in the first place. Right?
But hell… I was seven years old for christssakes.
Because like I say, you can be the responsible one, and be making good decisions (relative to your age), and still be screwed by the things happening around you.
Fate puts a drunk in your kitchen, and fate puts a knife in your hand. But the choice to use that knife is what separates us from fate. No where is it written that you have to plunge the blade. No where is it written that you have to stand back and let bad things happen.
What is written is what you bring to that decision. Each of us are a story in the telling, a bunch of words jumbled together in a great big ball, just waiting to be unravelled by the kitten of fate, swatted, tangled again, and left behind to work it out for ourselves. Those words are written into our bodies themselves, spoken by long-dead voices and sung by long-dead parties. We’re each just a song-sheet issued to two dead people in an aeon past, one passed down between successive canoodling couples. Our bodies are their bodies, their waters spilling into our meagre lives and flowing onwards in an inexorable stream of humanity, forever.
So, and I say without any meaning to arrogance or hubris, I am New Zealand.
That seven year-old boy in a paddock is this nation, because the entire history of this place from woe to go is written into his skin, his bones, his feeble muscles, his clenched fists and bulging eyes. Every event ever seen in this place is his story.
My body has walked this land since the day mankind first set foot here. I’ve seen every sunrise, felt every cold night, survived every winter. I’m made of all it’s foods, I’ve drank most all of it’s rivers, swam in its waters since day one. I’ve killed and died in its wars, and bought and sold its commerce. And I say again. I am New Zealand.
And every second of that history was pushed into a moment.
A choice.
A fate.
Another river held briefly at bay by the single slither of a knife’s edge.
* * *
So the chicken or the egg? The egg or the chicken? If you’re following my way of thinking the chicken is the egg and the egg is the chicken. You can’t separate the two because they’re both the same thing. They’re only considered different things because we have chosen to give them names that separate them. But fundamentally, the chicken and egg are one. You cannot have one without the other, so there never could have been a time when one existed in isolation.
And so it is with the knife. The knife was always there. It is still there. It will always be guiding itself into my hand, and will always be placed against that throat. Those whimpers of fear will always be there, just inside the channel of my ear, waiting till the rush and noise of this current water stills, to release themselves into the ether, and dissolve.
I first remember seeing the knife over a hundred years ago, on a shingle beach not so far from where I now sit. It was a bleak day and the southern winds were howling through the Cook Strait. The outcrop of rock to our right was as always some consolation, but the water was still cold, my fear mounting. To my front the work crew were hauling hard to get the Right Whale up onto the shingle shore, as high as possible. The tide would turn soon and we would have to work fast. The knife was thrust into my hand, and I was told to hold. If one came too close, to stab it.
It was the year 1836 and I was 23 years old, a full 12,000 miles from Kent, and I was a flenser sent to make his fortune on a stone beach 20 feet deep and 80 feet long perched beneath a towering jungle.
Flenser, you ask? Later my job was to stand back while the hatchet-men hacked through the great whale’s skin, then to myself carve the blubber from the beast, a slab of flesh as much as I could carry, and to take it up the beach to the pots. It was hard, stinking, greasy work, the stones slick with blood and oil, the air laden with the sailors foul language, the smoke of the wood fires, the salt air barely cutting through the haze of rotting flesh and bones.
When the whales were in we worked all day, every day, and slept clothed and rough in poorly thatched huts. I kept the blade with me at all times, my protection against accusations of laziness, of not carrying my share of the load, and of not being relegated to the station of ‘useless’, or ‘no-hoper’.
They were hard days on Kapiti. The worst being the fear. The fear that Te Rauparaha would come along the island, for the wily little bastard was less than a mile away, the fear that disease born of the filth we lived in would poison us, and the greatest fear, the worst fear, that my footing would fail me.
Because for now my job was the watch for the Great White sharks the like of which you have never seen that preyed in those blood-soaked waters. They would launch themselves onto the beach while we hauled ashore the whales and tear great hunks of flesh from the carcasses. The slippery-soled man would himself become their meal were he to fall into the breakers beyond the whale.
And there I was standing guard, a boy with a blade, frightened beyond his wits, if not only for fear of seeming a lesser man than I was.
* * *
Waitaminute… the reader says. Is this some kind if reincarnation thing? Are going to be subjected to an endless stream of hippy bullshit?
Well, no. I’ll get to the hippy’s all in good time sooner or later. For now we are talking about samsara, yes, but not in the way you think. Like all good and sticky ideas there is the popular version of what it means, and there’s the underlying truths. So I’m not exploring the idea that I’ve lived multiple lives. Going there becomes a little too fruity for my way of thinking. You know, we’ll start to wander into the realm of “belief”. I’m only interested in what I know. And I know I am the people who preceded me.
It’s not a belief structure because you don’t need to suspend credulity to understand how it works. You can see a child being born, and know that child wasn’t delivered by a stork or left under a cabbage leaf. We are each extensions of another life, and their lives wash through our bodies whether we know it or not.
So what of the field, the knife, the frightened boy? How is this evidence of samsara?
The field is where samsara is tested. The field is about choices, and how we make them within the patterns our bodies, our history, has laid out for us.
And the choices are everything. The define our legacy, and they set the course of our waters. Every person on that field made choices, as young as they were, to put them there. And, every person had choices made that effected why they were there. It’s the untangling them that is the mystery in life, and it is with the inevitable distance of time that we can see how these all interwove.
Take the friend for example, we couldn’t know where he would be 30 years from that day. But the seeds were sown. We were friends for years after the event, his defence of my actions an important part of the fallout. And his life has always been a yardstick for me in the transformation of a person in the passing of time, in the slow, lazy progress of the river.
When we were young he was known as the go-getter. He was all action; fit, healthy, knew where he wanted to be. He took life by the scruff of the neck and took what he needed from it. But somewhere this changed. Somewhere along the line he became less like the person his parents had made him, and less like the person the world around him understood him as.
You see, set upon the waters of his own life my friend was pushed to deny what he was. His attitude to life didn’t always sit right with the way people around us wanted him to be. He was called “too much” or “too big”. And so my friend chose to change over time, he suppressed his energy to better fit in, and to better be what was expected of him. He became more of what people wanted. I blame his decline on that.
A heart attack, 36, leaving a wife and three children.
I never thanked him for the way he defended me all those years ago, and I regret it deeply. He stuck by me the way a friend should, I regret not helping him make choices to avoid the fate he sailed towards. My not defending his right to be who he was helped nudge him away from his true course. And it is with his death I must finally tell this, my own, story.
* * *
All in all, history is really just a series of minute passing minutes that have incrementally defined the now. They slip past unnoticed and unremarked, but coalesce into the present and offer themselves into your hands. And because they do so, why go back? Why take a little trip back into the past? The present is past all bundled up and handed to you in newspaper, still steaming, hopefully fish and chips.
I went back to the very beginning because that past underlies the present and gives it meaning. When it comes time to heal the present you need to know where you’ve come from, because the from is a fundamental part of the now. Those things that make up our pasts become the language we each speak, they’re the syllables in the words we utter.
But, I’m starting to labour the point. The knife in the paddock and the knife on the shore are the same, and from delving into my own past looking for meaning I’ve discovered a number of such things, and how they’ve grown together to define me. They’re the suits and symbols that make up the cards dealt out to me, and they’re numbered by the individual actions of my predecessors.
You see there’s been numerous times when I couldn’t explain how and why I’ve reacted to or felt about things, only to have realisation fall upon me when a key piece of history is revealed, a pea exposed from under a shell to the light. Writing this story, this history, is a way of paying tribute to each of those pieces, and the way they’ve unlocked my life over so many years, slowly, with seemingly deliberate purpose. I’ve worked methodically to uncover each part, to bring them to the light of day, to examine them carefully, and to understand them. Because like old man Marley says, if you know your history, then you’ll know where you’re coming from. Pretty wise old guy that Marley (for a stoner mind you…)
All this is important because of where I grew up and what put me in that field. Events had conspired before I was born to completely isolate my atomic family. In fact, one could say that the advent of the Atomic age atomised us. But that would again be labouring the point (again). The truth of the matter is that a series of inevitable occurrences conspired to place me there, and is has only been with the fullness of time that I’ve been able to see each and every one of them for what they are. While a younger me would have blamed someone for the isolation, for instance for the flight of my uncles to foreign shores, and the sense of abandonment that ensued, the older me can see all the pieces that makes up the history, and can understand them.
The beauty of the history is that in revealing its fullness it has brought me closer to realising the interconnectedness of it all, and has left me to wonder how many other people are in similar circumstances. Who else has pondered their present or past and been unable to make sense of it because they lack those key pieces to peel away the mystery?
Perhaps, my story in the telling can inspire at least one other person to better comprehend their own full past, and the waters that have carried them into this present.
* * *
It was a warm Summer month in early ‘39, the kind that turns a man’s thoughts to things other than work. The whales had been and gone, and Christmas for what it was worth produced little for us there on Kapiti. Of most interest was the word that more British will be there soon, from some company being set up to bring a lot of soft settlers out from England. We all thought that we’d see what Te Rauparaha would think of them, there was still fire in the man yet, as old as he was.
I remember the pathway well, and making the short walk from Te Kahu o Te Rangi and the stink along to the fresher water of Waiorua. The deep ocean currents wash over the northern peninsula of the island and brought the occasional deep sea fish into the Maori nets, and we traded some of their catch when we were too busy rendering the oil to fish for ourselves.
It’s a strange relationship. I’ve heard they used to refer to us as ‘their Pakeha’, as if they forgot that we’re free men of Great Britain and not at all here by their leave. Still, they liked to brag to other tribes that they had us, and perhaps it increased their self-importance in some way, so we all said good luck to them. As long as the fish came when we asked for it, and they kept trading the flax we needed for the boats, then so be it.
If you’re wondering, I made the walk along the island to perhaps catch a glimpse of a certain young lady I’d heard might be visiting Waiorua with her family. They’re Te Ati Awa, the sometimes friends, sometimes not, of Te Rauparaha’s Ngati Toa, and they’re well settled on the mainland. I had thought to myself, a man could do worse than being the pet Pakeha of a family like that…
Te Rauparaha seemed to have gained some kind of respect for me since I chased him off my cutter with a hatchet. He was demanding something I’d not had the mind to give him, and his confrontation got the better of my temper. I think the great Chief always did know the right time to surrender ground and over the side he went in a great retreat! Once we’d smoothed the old boy’s feathers he seems to have become a little fond of me, and it’s for that and his influence I was able to even think of courting the daughter of Rawiri Nukaiahu, a chief of the Puketapu. His wife Pakewa signed that Treaty you know, the one the missionary from up north brought to Port Nicholson, for what good it did them.
It’s grand when a little Dutch courage pays off like that, for on the walk along the island that day I snuck a look at her in the distance, and it was not long before I was able to marry her. Well, this is a fib. We married in 1849, but the marriage itself started in 1841, but such is the way in New Zealand. Her name was Pairoke, and she was my wife for 12 good years. A grand twelve years. And what a family we made.
* * *
It was yet another cold and grey day in Wellington the first time I’d ever heard of the Treaty. Actually, that’s an exaggeration. It was a cold and grey day the first time I ever realised the relevance of the Treaty. Until that day the Treaty was an abstract thing. A “something signed way back when”.
I was going through a stage in my life when I was soaking up information like a sponge. Which was strange in itself considering that my escalating to serious drug and alcohol habit was concurrently becoming all-consuming. Somehow I was managing though, and using the experiences to push my consciousness to new heights. I was taking all the lessons I’d learned at the feet of my older people, channelling them, and burning all the more brightly for it. But again, we’ll get to the hippies later in the piece.
My university experience mostly involved getting loaded, heading to campus, and moping about observing people’s behaviours, their interactions, their ways of being. I would attend lectures between bouts of snooping through the deepest recesses of the library looking for arcanery and mysteries. Old tomes written in the 1800s. Old discharged and ignored sciences. Alternative ways of looking at the world. Secrets hidden from the light; underground, musty and mostly meaningless.
Thing is, I knew that something had drawn me to where I was. At the time my entire knowledge of my family history, of me, extended only as far as my grandparents. But I was still drawn, inevitably, towards the South, the miserable weather and away from the Bay of Plenty.
The balancing act that was substance abuse was weighting heavily on me, but my natural inclination to curiosity kept up, so hand in hand my knowledge and my dependency grew to new heights. They were dark days, the weight of the world sitting heavily upon skinny shoulders, and it often seemed that it was only good fortune, my constant companion, held back the fate being doled out to so many others.
It was the Quad outside the library on campus, and some amateur political rally was underway. Student politicians practising strutting and grooming one another for the day they ascend to office in a city council, or worse. The same damn exercise in mutual masturbation acted out on campuses across the nation, the world. It was the same characters I’d seen overseas (again, we’ll get to that), but a little “smaller”, and more like New Zealanders.
The candidates at the front were doing a lot of arm waving, a lot of pretending to state their own relevance to issues far larger than their ability to act or their capacity to reason, and a lot of shouting. I was rapidly becoming bored, and my mind was beginning to wander back along the path down to the flat, my fire, and my stash.
She spoke up from a crowd of people over the other side of the quad. It was though I’d walked all the way up the hill just to hear her voice. A young woman, not far from my age, dressed warmly but not wealthy, and surrounded by people she obviously knew well and trusted. She was clear, concise, and could obviously see through the posers below us blocking the doors to the library.
“But what about our Rights under the Treaty?”
No reasonable answer was forthcoming. A response I rapidly became used to.
* * *
I’m standing in the bow of a low, long boat, and I’m hefting a harpoon. Harpoon. It’s a great word no? Roll it around in your mouth and it sounds ancient, haaaaa-poooon. I’m sounding it myself while I’m looking over the side of the boat at the choppy green water, the northernly breeze bringing warm air from over the Alps and off the lands. Father sounds out quietly, “Spear the calf, the mother will come after.”
Spear the calf. Spear the calf. I repeat it to myself over and over, all the time watching the water for the sign of the beast rising from the water.
The beast rising from the water. Rising from the water. The Beast. Mother would be proud, I’m even remembering my Revelations. And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and I saw a beast did rise up.
I glance backwards. My older brothers are in the longboat behind me resting on their oars. We’ve two days of water and biscuit, and we’re 12 hours into this day’s rowing. They’re still and there’s only the lapping of the oars in the water, and the chop of the waves against the side of the boat.
“Sign!! Starboard!” Someone whispers between gritted teeth, and the brothers lean in, the boat jerking as the oars bite, father pulling the rudder hard so we launch towards the rapidly smoothening patch of water. The whale’s head breaks the surface, its blowhole releasing a spray into the air, its slick sides rushing past the waves and slipping beneath the water.
“The calf!!” Father yells. I can see it rising with the cow, close to its mother’s side, it’s tiny eye appearing as the longboat bears down on them both. My brothers have their speed up, their backs straining to get us close enough to the pair, their silence broken as Father yells “Heave you useless buggers!! She’ll not escape us today!!”
A second is split while I draw back my arm and heave the harpoon. My brothers are grunting and roaring. The wind whistling and whipping the water past the bow. The long back of the cow sliding like a great tentacle through the water.
It grunts when the tip enters. A low shudder of shock. Its eye looks at me still. In wonder. In alarm. The sharpened metal of the harpoon sinking into its flanks. The rope unrolling out past my legs as the calf sinks beneath the waves, its life spilling into the water in a long red stream.
“Make for the shore lads!” Father yells, “the cow will be back for the calf and the Wrights will have her, by God!”
For two days we’ll tether ourselves to her dying carcass, here on the ocean, to be dragged till she tires, a waiting game of courage and endurance.
* * *
Well who would have thought it?
I know your parents tell you I was 19 when your Great-Grandfather and I had married, but I was in fact only 16. Your Great-Grandfather and I became betrothed and married in town called Cranbrook in Kent. It’s a lovely place and the parish church, St Dunstan, was built way back in the Fifteenth Century, would you believe it! The 19 comes in because that’s how old I was when we set sail in 1840 on the Martha Ridgeway for Port Nicholson (that’s in the north you know, and they call it Wellington these days my dear).
That was a hard journey that was. My first child, bless her soul, was just three years old, and I was not long pregnant as well, so you can imagine my discomfort. But we don’t complain, do we now?
Yes, a very hard journey. Although I was pregnant on the voyage I gave birth to twins with the help of the ship’s doctor, twins boys, both stillborn. That was a sad time… But how were we to know then that we would go on to have another 12 children! And a blessing that was too, for not long after we arrived at Petone my eldest daughter also died.
How I hated this place when we first arrived… My next child was stolen by the Maoris after her birth, for they’d never seen a white child before! The first white child in the district she was thought to be, and they took her with them up to the pa to show her off. My goodness how James was angry and frightened! There was talk of them eating her (for the Maoris ate a lot of people in those days don’t you know), but as it happens they were just curious.
There was a great show when James turned up to collect her, for he was never a small man, as you know! There was a time there at Akaroa where they laid James and your nine Great-Uncles out head to toe, head to toe, for a lark mind, and they were the full length of a chain!
What?
Oh, that’s 66 feet my dear! A chain is 66 feet long.
They certainly were a big set of lads my boys. And they certainly took some feeding, let me tell you! They’d come in from the whaling and they’d empty the pantry the lot of them. My word we’d be cooking for days to prepare for them coming back.
Hmmm? Yes. Yes it wasn’t an easy life out there. We left Petone only two years after we arrived, James had been working for the Governor trying to intervene in the musket and liquor trade, which was terrible, and we travelled again, this time to Akaroa. There James got work for Paddy Wood, but this didn’t last long, thank goodness, for Paddy was a brawler, and a drunk. And there I was, the only woman in the whole world it seemed…
It was a relief when we moved and finally settled in Whakamoa Bay, let me tell you!
* * *
I was nine years old when I set out from England. Nine. I was born on Sheppey, which is in the Thames Estuary by the way, and put to sea like all the men of that small island. The war with Napoleon was over, Wellington having seem the little bastard off, and the sea seemed the natural place for an additional son.
But it served me well. I saw much of the world from the deck of many a sort of ship before leaving the whaler Catherine and finding my feet here in New Zealand. Like all good wanderers sometimes you just need a clear place to stand before you can stop the roaming, and this was as good as any.
After I took up with Pairoke we settled on her family’s land just south of their pa, that’s a kind of picket fort by the way, there were still the occasional war between the tribes in these parts, which goes to show, you can travel 12,000 miles and still be surrounded by people wanting to kill one another… and I took up farming.
Farming, can you believe it. Farming! These local Maori didn’t need a fisherman you see. We’d long since taken all the whales from these waters, and the locals could fish well enough for themselves. So farming it was. Me, as sailor for twenty years. Farming. At least I still had a cutter to run when the salt had cleared too much from my veins.
We cleared the land and placed on it sheep, cattle, and horses. And it was this trade that the locals wanted. It was strange in those days of New Zealand. There was a tension between the British setting up in Petone and in the South Island and the local tribes, that Arthur Wakefield was an arrogant petty aristocrat, and it occasionally split over into bloodshed. But I? I was welcomed.
And so here I am now in a paddock. Every man who comes here knows you could make a fortune in these waters, and here I am, moving into husbandry! If me old dad could see me now. Tell you what, he’d be amazed, his boy, landed gentry.
We’re even thinking of putting a tavern up on the roadside, to try and capture a little of the traffic heading to Port Nicholson. Now that would likely spin a pretty penny… A pretty penny indeed.
* * *
As a child the only of these histories I was familiar with was the first, the bastard son who escaped the convict isle. It’s not exactly an ennobling story, especially to a boy well-able to read and discover the unspoken details of what such a life must have been like. There is no romance in that tale, no military history, no great battle against the odds. Just a boy run to escape and held to ransom.
I think, if anything, it demonstrates clearly to me now, as an adult, how even as children the narratives we build around ourselves can become all-encompassing. The stories your family tells of its own past, of from whence your waters run, and feeds into the daily speaking of where and who you are. They run under your consciousness, and manifest in your own talk of who you think you should be. Being given a past without dignity echoes within people, and profoundly influences who they are, and the world-view they enjoy.
So there I am you see, a criminal’s child. A bastard scion of an unknown house. A boy who sees himself with no future but that he can make for himself, and I’m acting it out unknown to my tiny seven-year-old mind. I have no dignity and only shame. I am a boy wishing he were a man, full and straining at the boundaries of lives unfulfilled.
But beneath what I knew there was this other layer, a set of lives I could not have known of, because they were unknown to the adults around me. And it’s that layer waiting to be revealed that has characterised my life. Just when I thought there was no more of interest to learn, another veil has been lifted, and my view has changed again, with divine provenance gifting me yet another knowing.
It is a strange thing this life. At times it is as thought I have lived many lives, with the twists and turns of fate’s flow lifting and carrying me gently between the spectres of the past, unfolding and lighting them with the magician’s sleight of hand, letting them fall onto my path for me to understand. This, a life never meant to be. A gift forged from a choice made by a teenage girl on the shores of a foreign, alien, harsh environment (for that is what I imagine her to have been, the woman who set this slow-rising locomotive in train).
At the centre of all this is that. The knowing this life was a gift. Whether a gift given in jest or love is a question yet to be settled, but the gift itself has been well-received (if at times a little petulantly). It’s that, I think, that has always aided the decision. The choices to stave off the knife. To keep the hand steady. To see out the flow, and know all the mysteries, and to know where the poison was introduced, and why it placed me in that field on that cold winter’s day.
