Not long after Mum tried to go to school with us on Old Pomp, Mr Robinson came out to the farm, and we watched while he put the wheels back on our old car and took it down off its blocks. He filled it up with oil and benzine and water, greased it, put in a new battery, and got it going again. It made a strange noise, at first, smoke came out of the exhaust, and Jimmy and Betty shrieked that it was on fire.
“How would you like to be woken up after being asleep for a couple of years?” Mr Robinson said. “You’d blow out a bit of smoke, too.” And Jimmy and Betty looked at each other and grinned.
Mum drove the car round and round the front paddock for a few days before she was game to take it out on the road. Kate sat in the front seat and told Mum when she should be changing gears, and Mum said, “For goodness’ sake, Kate, who’s driving this car, you or me?” And Kate said she thought she could drive at least as good as Mum, and Mum said, “That’ll do now!” and drove into one of the holes the nasty old Jersey bull made in the front paddock before the war.
We had to get the shovel and dig out the edge of the hole before Mum could get the car going again. “And we’ll have no more instructions from you, my girl!” she told Kate. Then she drove straight into Old Pomp’s sandy patch in the house paddock.
We bounced up and down on the back seat, and said,
“We’ll have no more instructions from you, my girl!” till Mum told us to hold our tongues and sit still. Then she drove us down to the cowshed, and we wiped all the dust out of the copper, lit a fire underneath and heated some water, and gave the car a good scrub all over. We even wiped the inside, to get all the dust off, and washed the windows, and got rid of all the spiders’ webs.
We hung up the harness, and pushed the buggy backwards into its shed. It looked sad sitting there, the tips of its shafts on the ground, so Betty patted it and said, “You’ve been a very good buggy.” For a few days, she and Jimmy went down and threw water over the wheels so they wouldn’t dry out again.
Old Pomp didn’t seem to care. He never even looked at the buggy, not even when we rode him up to the shed and showed it to him. He just turned away and started pulling at the grass.
“I’ll bet he wants to drive the car, too,” said Jimmy, “like Kate.”
Next thing we knew, there was a telegram from the Prime Minister, Mr Fraser. We had the day off school, and Mum got down her leather hat box off the top of her wardrobe and took out her hat and put it on. We all pointed at it and shrieked because we couldn’t remember ever seeing Mum wearing her hat, except when she went to a wedding.
She looked in her mirror, tucked up her hair, and drove us into the Waharoa station. Before she got out of the car, she looked in the mirror at her hat and patted it a couple of times.
Everyone waiting on the platform was dressed up, the women all wearing hats. “See!” Mum said to us. The men lifted their hats when they said hello to her.
The grownups were nervous, you could tell by the scratchy voices and shrieks of laughter. It was exciting, like waiting for something to happen, but there was something different. I looked at Jimmy and saw he was white-faced and hanging on to Mum.
There was a whistle, and a train came into sight down by the factory, and I was holding my breath so nothing would go wrong after all the years. The train stopped, and I had to take another breath and hold it, and some soldiers and a man in blue air force uniform climbed off and stood on the platform, shaking hands with their mates through the windows, while we waited for them to turn and look at us.
The troop train whistled, clanked, and chuffed away towards Matamata, the little knot of returned men watching the back of the guard’s van shrink and disappear, as if they’d lost something, as if they wanted to run after it and get back on with their mates. It seemed ages before they turned around, and we could see their faces, and people started calling out names and running towards them.
“Is that your father?” Mum asked us, but we couldn’t remember what he looked like. Later on, he said it was just as well he knew who we were, or he might have had to go home without us. Mind you, Kate said she knew at once it was him because of the single wing on his blue uniform, with A G which meant he was an air gunner.
We stood around staring at Mum because we didn’t know whether she was going to cry or laugh. None of us knew what to say. People pushed their faces down into ours and asked, “What’s it like having your father home?” but we still didn’t know what to say. Instead, we squabbled over who was going to carry his blue canvas kitbag with his name and number in big black letters to the Chev, but it was so heavy he had to carry it himself after all.
“Are you coming to school today, Mum?” Jimmy said, the next morning.
Mum looked a bit surprised and shook her head. “You can all give school a miss today,” she told us, and we had that day off as well. I don’t remember Mum ever talking of coming to school again, after Dad came home.
We spent that day taking Dad round the farm, telling him how we shifted the steers for the war effort, and how we slept in the haystack to catch the bandicoot. When Mum told him the prices at the last sales, he whistled and said we’d done real good, but we might as well buy some heifers and start milking again, now he was back.
It’s funny, when you think of it, but nobody seemed to notice how Mum changed after Dad came home. Jimmy and Betty told him about the time when she flew halfway to school as an air gunner in the rear turret of a Lancaster bomber, and how she once played barefoot for the All Blacks. I don’t suppose he believed them, not really. Most of the time, we were so busy getting used to having him home again, I think we just forgot about the funny ideas Mum had when Dad was overseas.
It was a couple of days before I thought it was safe to stop holding my breath. I seemed to have been holding it ever since Dad went away because somebody had told me it would keep off bad luck. But now I let out my breath. I went, “Huff!” a couple of times, “Huff! Huff!” just to make sure all the dead air was out, and Dad was home for good.