CHAPTER 6

1953. As the ship pulled away from the dock, streamers held by passengers on the deck and their relatives on shore began to stretch and break, a tide of singing rolling out Now is the hour / for me to saaay goodbye. Around Albert, standing at the railing of the Captain Cook, girls began to cry. He was on his own, his family left behind in Belfast. Just as well his mother wasn’t there, he thought; it had been bad enough extricating himself from her last frantic hug as it was.

A man alongside him, a tall chap, perhaps four or five years older, leaned over. ‘I’m on my own too.’ He offered his hand. ‘Peter Simpson,’ he said, and for some reason they were friends straight away.

He’d have been lonely those first nights on the boat if he hadn’t met Peter. The man from Liverpool told him he’d been out of work for a year. With a bit of graft he’d managed to scrape together the ten pounds needed to make the voyage out. What did he mean by graft? Albert wanted to know.

Peter hesitated. He was a clean-cut fellow, what Albert’s mother would have called decent to look at. Odd jobs on building sites, rat catching, that sort of thing. Going without dinner two nights a week so he could save his benefit. Yeah, tough, but he reckoned he could make a go of it in New Zealand. He was twenty-three, it was now or never.

When Albert said he was just eighteen these three months past, Peter looked him over, told him to hang out with him. You never knew what was around the corner. There were more than a thousand of them on the ship, men and women and some children — child migrants, Peter said. They were the ones to watch out for. They hadn’t asked to be sent, most of them had had it pretty rough. They’d pick your pockets if they had half a chance.

‘Not their fault,’ Peter said, ‘they’re kids out of orphanages, most of them, had the shit beaten out of them, abandoned like kids out of a Dickens novel and posted to the other side of the world.’ Albert had read Oliver Twist in school. His new friend seemed to have a literary turn of mind. A clever man who’d come up through the school of hard knocks. Well, him and himself and all, and goodness knows how many others on the ship, though it seemed he had had it easier than some. During the voyage, these Oliver Twist children appeared now and then, some quite small, barely ready for school, others teenagers. They had closed, tight little faces, as if they already knew all there was to know about life and more.

His father had found the ten pounds that was needed to get him on board, all the family’s savings. Ten quid for the passage and a fiver to set you up when you get over there, was what he’d said. His mother had said, with bitterness at the corners of her mouth, that some of the money would have come from his grandmother, the one who lived so close but they never saw. His grandparents, she said, had had money and lost it, but his mother still liked to act as if they’d got the spondulicks tucked away. She didn’t want him to leave.

‘You need to get out of here,’ his father had said. ‘There’s nothing for you.’

This was not strictly true, for the rebuilding of Belfast since the war was still going on, and there was work on the docks, but that was what it was, labouring jobs and plenty of competition for them. He wondered if his father was reflecting his disappointment at his own situation. The war had left him without a lot of strength, and the doors to a life of words were closed to him. The image of his father, scrawny in his baggy trousers and braces, his hair thinning into mousy strands, would come back to haunt him. There were times when he wondered if his father had sent him away because he thought his wife loved him, her son, more than she did him. One of those things that hung in the air. ‘You could perhaps study when you get settled in New Zealand,’ his father said.

Albert laughed then. He had no ideas of going back to school. Here he was, eighteen years of age, and that was all behind him. Only the scholarship boys stayed at school that long, and he was not one of those. ‘I’ll be indentured in New Zealand for two years,’ he said.

‘Well then, you can do a trade, count yourself lucky.’

‘You want me to go, don’t you?’

‘The Catholics are on the move. They’ll take against us sooner or later,’ his father said.

‘Haven’t we taken against them already, Da?’

His father gave him a hard look then. ‘Remember you’re part of the United Kingdom,’ he said. ‘Remember, you heard it from me, there’s trouble ahead of us here.’

So there was that, perhaps: his father thought he was too close to the Taigs. He would stand, leaning against the rail, trying to make sense of it, watching the sea churn beneath him, or gazing out to a distance so vast it made his eyes ache trying to see a non-existent coastline. Sometimes he wished the ship would turn around, other times it occurred to him that he might jump in the sea and swim back home.

As if he had been reading his thoughts, Peter appeared beside him. ‘You coming along to the dance tonight?’

‘I can’t dance.’

‘Some girl will teach you.’

As he stood on the edge of the jiving chaos of the dance floor, shy because he was young and didn’t know any English girls, one of them pulled him towards her. He shivered a moment as if an electric current had passed through his body, and his feet found the rhythm of the beat. Dancing came as naturally to him as breathing. The girl wore a tight white blouse and a wide skirt that whirled when he swung her around to the music. Afterwards the pair of them, and a whole bunch of others, went up to the deck and sang along to a guitar a fella had brought to play in the night air. The stars were high in the sky as the ship headed towards the Caribbean Sea and beyond that the Panama Canal. They were singing I don’t want to set the world on fire, harmonising as if they were The Ink Spots, when he kissed the nape of the girl’s neck and felt her breath quickening, starting to kiss him back. ‘Paddy,’ she said, ‘you’re the sweetest kid.’

‘My name’s Albert,’ he said.

‘Oh, g’won, aren’t all Irishmen called Paddy? You’re going to set the world on fire, babe.’ The next minute she was gone, but that was how it started, his new name, and he liked it, it had an easy ring. He stopped having to explain that he was from Northern Ireland, the divisions within his country, whether he kicked with the left foot or the right, he was just Paddy the Irish guy.

When he went down below, he found Peter sitting smoking a cigarette in the lounge. It seemed that their lives had turned a corner into a place of luxury and expansiveness. The idea of a new country took hold of him and he imagined limitless possibility.

‘You found yourself a girlfriend?’ Peter asked.

‘Nah, I think I was too young for her. She did a runner on me.’ But that seemed all right too, because there were so many girls, all as hyped up with excitement as he was, and tomorrow night he would sing along with some other girl at his side.

Paddy, as everyone on the ship called him and he now thought of himself, had seen pictures of the great skylines of the world. There was London, where he had now spent two nights, and Paris and New York with its skyscrapers. He knew that Wellington was a capital city, and he was expecting more of the same. But as the Captain Cook sailed into the harbour, all he could see was low white houses huddled on hills, a raw new-looking place in comparison to home.

When they disembarked, he sensed it was a quiet place. Not that there was time to explore. Within an hour or so, he and Peter were despatched on a train to a village called Trentham, way beyond the city limits, part of an area known as the Hutt Valley, a satellite of Wellington, with an Upper and a Lower Hutt. It had just turned out so, that they were to be fellow workers, laying cable for the Post and Telegraph Department. A truck picked them up at the station, driving past military barracks and a racecourse, until they came to a group of small isolated huts set among unrecognisable trees. The very sparseness of their surroundings made Albert, who was now called Paddy, long again for home.

He hung up his coat and unfolded the two blankets lying on the end of the bed. Then he took his coat down and put it back on again and sat shivering on the side of the bed. It was the middle of October and they had been told that it was spring here in New Zealand. If this was spring, it was a cold one. His longing turned to a deep well of loss, a grief so profound he could hardly breathe.

There was a knock at the door. Peter stood there, in his hand a mug of tea that steamed against a frosty landscape, a full moon bouncing across the sky. ‘We’ll get out of here when we can,’ he said.

Something, bird or animal, they couldn’t tell, called honk honk, again and again, out there in the moonlight.

It wasn’t all bad. In the morning they were taken to a training station, where they were shown a model of the top of a telegraph pole and how to find broken insulators. They looked like white china cups. The two of them were allocated to Clarrie’s gang. ‘I’ve got a couple of pakehas here for you,’ the foreman said. ‘New chums.’ From now on they would be inspecting the telegraph poles, looking for broken insulators, rotten cross-arms and poles that were in any way unsafe. The weather turned fine and warm.

‘Scorcher of a day,’ Clarrie would say as one gleaming day of sunlight turned to another.

‘Scorcher, my old mucker,’ Peter would mutter to Paddy, mopping his brow, a cigarette clamped between his teeth. ‘Scorcher, all right.’

They were sent to work amongst pine trees above Wellington Harbour. The trees were so thick, the men could scramble from tree to tree to reach the lines without hauling the extension ladders off the trucks. The clean bristling scent of the pines and the laughter of the others purged Paddy during the daytime at least of what he vaguely understood to be homesickness. In some place in his heart he felt tiredness, and he was too young to have a tired heart.

‘What is the creature that goes honk honk in the night?’ Paddy asked Clarrie. He imitated the sound the way he had heard it.

‘Morepork, you’ve heard the morepork bird. It’s an owl, a ruru,’ Clarrie said. Clarrie came from up north, a Maori fulla, he described himself, a big man but lithe amongst the tree tops. There were other Maoris in the gang. They whistled a lot and spoke to each other in a language that Paddy and Peter couldn’t understand, but for the most part it seemed good-natured enough.

‘Is that what it’s asking for?’ Paddy asked. ‘More pork?’

Clarrie laughed and the whole gang joined in. ‘Nah, mate, they like a tasty little mouse or a rat. You’re too big to get eaten by a morepork.’

Still, he couldn’t stop listening to the bird sounding its melancholic haunting notes, as if it were coming for him.

1954. While the fires burned each year in Belfast, books were being set alight up and down New Zealand. Police moved from one bookshop to another, raiding lending libraries and swooping on little corner dairies that carried a small stock of paperbacks, snatching books and comics along the way. Moral panic had seized the country as word spread of an epidemic of loose behaviour by teenagers. Rose Lewis had heard about this because her neighbours talked about it incessantly, and she was bewildered. It all started with the war, some muttered, when the bloody Yanks moved in and corrupted people’s minds, never mind their role in the Pacific. They brought candy and flattery and jitterbug dances, petting in the back seat of movie theatres and free love. It was all there in the books. The name Mickey Spillane crept into the vocabulary of the young, a novelist who wrote of violence and sex and degradation. In schools, his books were passed surreptitiously, hand to hand, under the cover of desks, tucked under copies of En Route and History for Everyone. It was terrifying. The centre of this storm of delinquency was the Hutt Valley. One only had to look there to know that things had fallen apart: that’s what the newspapers wrote in their editorials and their headlines. There, in the suburbs of the Hutt, teenagers gathered at milk bars, or sat in the back seats of theatres doing lewd things to each other, or were collecting on the edges of the wide, swift river and having carnal knowledge. Carnal. The word had an evil ring to it. It was said that the hospitals for unmarried mothers were filling. There was a black market in condoms, so it was whispered. Condoms were banned for the young, although if you knew the right fruiterer to go to you might just strike it lucky. Nestling behind the bananas and pineapples, the dark plums and the rosy apples, the path to the ripe fruit of love might be realised without consequences. Or even at the pie cart. Hot chips and a frenchie, all for five bob.

These were the things Rose was hearing, yet it all seemed a world away from her little house provided by the state in Naenae, one of the new suburbs in the Hutt. Her husband had come home from the war long enough to give her three children, two boys and a girl, before he died during an asthma attack. He hadn’t had asthma when he went to the war. She blamed the trenches, the dark winters of the northern hemisphere, rotten rations. There were so many like her, she tried not to be bitter. She had loved that man. She loved him still. Each day she dressed as if he were about to walk in the door, pretty print dresses and a touch of make-up to highlight the warm blush of her skin, her light auburn hair caught up in a roll, small tendrils escaping around her face. She kept herself in this manner not for any other man but to honour the memory of him. Music was her consolation. The rectangular house overflowing with children, or so it seemed, was home to a piano. When the hurt descended, the black moments when it seemed grief would overwhelm her, she would lay her fingers on the keys and the rooms filled with melodies plucked from her past, when she was a star music pupil in the city.

And outside she had begun a garden. So many houses had been built in haste, all looking so much alike, she had wondered where to begin when she first came. The bulldozers that had prepared the land for the construction of all these houses to accommodate the hard-up like her had flattened the ground, leaving swathes of bare clay. There was a rawness about the place that had to be overcome. She had mapped out where the paths would run, and laid down grass so the children had space to play, then she turned over a patch of ground where she planted vegetables — potatoes and carrots, beans and silver beet. The flowers would come later. She knew the soil was good because beyond the houses lay market gardens. The boys worked alongside her, clearing the surface clay in wheelbarrows and spreading fertiliser. They were such good boys, she couldn’t imagine they would ever find or make the trouble that was spoken of in hushed voices by her neighbours. The girl, Evelyn, with her curls and her smile, tagged along behind, a three-year-old with her own toy wheelbarrow. She wheeled her dolls, or the kittens, wherever they went in the garden. A stream ran nearby, and it was one of the boys’ jobs to make sure Evelyn didn’t wander off and get caught in its flow. What they did catch were eels, which Rose learned to skin and cook. Her neighbours despised the fish, citing their poisonous blood when raw, but she knew better than that, frying them and serving them with butter sauce.

The flowerbeds began to take hold, the roses to bloom, the contours of the section to soften. More and more often there were days when Rose could tell herself she was content. One afternoon two young men knocked on her door. At first she couldn’t understand what they said, the accents of Liverpool and Ireland thick on their tongues.

They were working in the area laying cables. We’re looking for something more like home, they explained, because it wasn’t that comfortable in the Post and Telegraph huts where they were living. Naenae appealed to them, kind of cosy-looking, so they’d knocked on a few doors. Someone along the street had suggested she might put them up for a few nights. Mrs Lewis, she’s kind, the woman had said.

At first she had laughed. ‘Where on earth does she think I’d put you? I’ve got three kids already.’

‘We’d pay our way, give you board money,’ said the one she took to be younger, the one with the Irish accent. ‘We don’t mind bunking in the same room.’ One of the cats slid between his ankles. He leaned down and stroked it.

She was about to send them on their way. She had a widow’s pension, and had begun to give piano lessons to two or three children in the street for three shillings a lesson — but still she was stretched. The older of her boys was ready for a bike, the second had outgrown his school shoes. And Evelyn really liked sharing her mother’s bedroom when she could get away with it.

While she was standing there turning the whole unlikely situation over in her mind, the Irish boy began to recite. My aunt Jane has a bell on the door / a white stone step and a clean swept floor / candy apples, hard green peas / conversation lozenges.

‘My name’s not Jane,’ she said.

‘Neither is it my aunt’s.’

‘There are two beds in the sun porch,’ she said, the words sliding out before she could stop them. They looked nice enough lads, she thought.

‘I’m Peter,’ the taller one said, holding out his hand.

‘My mam calls me little Albert,’ the Irish boy said, and a grin lit up his face. ‘You look just like her, like my mam.’

‘But I’m not your mother either.’

‘I’m called Paddy out here.’ His jet-black hair was brushed back from his forehead, his skin tanned from working in the outdoors, a clean white shirt buttoned to his throat.

‘Just for a few nights, mind you,’ she said. ‘Until you find yourselves somewhere more permanent.’

After dinner, when they had all helped her clear away and wash the plates, Rose sat down at the piano and began to play, fingering threads of melodies. Behind her, Paddy picked up the words of ‘The World is Waiting for the Sunrise’, and as he began the first line, Dear one, his voice soared, sweet and true. Rose looked at him, and started humming along with him.

‘You’re a singer,’ she said. ‘You have the most beautiful voice.’

‘Oh well, it’s what we did, my family and all. Song’s cheap.’

She figured the young men had come to stay for a while.