MY TUMMY AND HEAD ARE STILL SWIRLING FROM OUR winding journey around the bays, my growing legs aching at the incline and the anticipation of adventure. We are six in this gang of almost orphans—three raucous friends, plus me and my siblings—skipping and singing and branding each other with the monkey tails we’ve collected along the way.
I am eleven, and we are walking the path to the Massey Memorial in Wellington. I was born nearby, in Miramar. This is where I took my first breath, my tūrangawaewae. It is the place I feel connected to, where I feel home.
Our mothers follow our voices up the promontory to the top of the hill.
We are spies or statues or warriors. We are hiding behind pillars or pretending to push them over. We are wrestling and breakdancing and cartwheeling our way across the marble mausoleum.
Tag! Got you!
But my favourite pastime lies at the centre of the seven sturdy columns. The old gun embankment, now covered with a circular marble seal. I lie back on the giant marble coin, its cool surface soothing my whipped legs, the clouds morphing overhead into rabbits and sheep and fish.
I close my eyes, and the competing squeals of fright and laughter fade away. I feel anchored to this place. I can feel the sacredness of this earth, the importance of the person buried beneath its shiny floor, even though I don’t know who he is. This marble fortress is a beacon, calling me, reassuring me. You are home. The smooth marble in stark contrast to the jagged rocks below. This is the one place I can go to forget I am sad, if only for a while. When I lie in this place and stare at the sky, I forget my granda has died, or that my father has left, or that my best friend has just moved away. Mum isn’t angry up here. My hand-me-down clothes, my grazed knees, the dark and deep loneliness all shrink away.
As I lie there, a memory comes to me of Frank driving my cousin Nat and me in his Bedford van. We are in the front seat, eating lollies from a paper bag. We are watching planes take off. I am drinking from a water bottle.
I open my eyes, and the memory dissolves in the breeze.
The shadow of the wind dances across the harbour, carrying the scents of my childhood: jet fuel and salt air mixed with the sun and the breeze. You can’t beat Wellington on a good day.
When we start to moan about our hungry bellies, our sore legs and the heat, our mums gather us up and we leave. We head down another track—the secret track! We pass lovers kissing on the grass—ew, yuck! We shoot them from the bushes, then disappear beneath the trees. We slip in the dust, racing each other down, away from the marble and the kissing and the cartwheels, towards the rocky shore below.
We arrive at the water’s edge, a necklace of buoys floating lazily in the background. We are eager to dip our toes in and cool off, but the promise of ice creams and shade keeps us moving. We teeter our way over rockpools and asphalt, past the lighthouse with the checkerboard coat. There are limpets and cat’s-eyes and knotted old twine spat out by the tide. We stroke anemones and tickle hermit crabs, flicking water and stones as we go. We crest the last rock and haul our tired, sunburnt bodies up to the carpark.
Ice cream! Ice cream!
There are so many memories that I have carefully gathered and stored, at once comforting and painful and delicate and mighty. I replay them and pause them and put them away, all these moments, to catalogue and remember.
When the shadows creep in, I search for this memory.
I call to it and sit with it, stroking its edges until it softens me, becomes me, warming me from the inside out. This is the essence of my childhood, where I come home to.
Tūrangawaewae.
Six years later, at the age of seventeen, I arrive in Paris on an AFS student exchange. In a few days, I will meet my host family in Strasbourg, enrol in high school and make new friends. But today, we are ten Kiwis banded together, all jetlagged and excited, green yet confident. From a distance at least, we look like we know what we’re doing. We are connected for now, awkward but smiling, before we head off to our separate corners of l’Hexagone.
We head to the local tabac to buy postcards, chocolate, cigarettes. We are laughing at the weirdness of being here, at the different smells and foods and weather. I feel very grown up with my demitasse espresso, my Gauloises and the handful of francs rattling around in my pocket.
As we cross the street, the ground shifts beneath me. I turn to those beside me, but they carry on, completely unaffected. I gaze at my new friends, and I get the feeling I’ve been here before.
No one else reacts. Only me.
Later, I call Mum to tell her I’ve arrived safely, that my passport and traveller’s cheques are locked away, that I saw La Tour Eiffel. I tell her what we ate for breakfast, but I keep the Gauloises to myself. Then I mention the déjà vu, and she says that used to happen to Poppa when he travelled, too. She also tells me he could divine water, and had strong gut feelings about people or events.
I hold on to this wisp of connection to a man I can hardly remember.
In that moment, I feel closer to him. I feel like him.
When it happens again, and again, and again, I hold it close and tell no one. I remember I’m special, like him.
I spend the next few years studying and partying at Victoria University, pretending I know where I’m going, to cover up for the fact that I don’t. Occasionally, I walk past the earth sciences department. I’m hoping for a glimpse of anything related to Antarctica, wishing I was interested in science so I could go there, staring at displays and polar photographs until I am late for my next lecture.
I wish for something meaningful in my life.
I graduate and I get a job. I’m flatting, clubbing, paying off my student loan, saving.
Then Mum mentions we’ve been invited to write a letter to Poppa for the twentieth anniversary of Erebus. These letters will be sent to Archives New Zealand, who will preserve them in a book. I hardly take any notice; I think it’s a ridiculous idea. What would I write to the grandfather I hardly knew, but felt close to all the same? Baring my soul in front of my family—in front of 250 other families? No thanks.
A year later, we celebrate Mum’s fiftieth birthday. I make a speech about how audacious she was in her youth, travelling alone to Samoa well before tourism or airconditioning, and flying with the New Plymouth Aero Club as an unmarried woman in the 1960s (gasp!). My mother, Raewyn Christmas, was the first woman in the club to fly solo with the fewest instruction hours. I wonder if her record still stands.
Before Erebus, my mother was fearless.
Some time later, I am back in France. I have quit my job and spent my entire savings reconnecting with a country I love, with my host family and my friends. It has been five months since I left New Zealand—five months of adventure without the pressure of work or family commitments. I finally feel free—but, still, something is off. It’s bothering me to the point that I cannot sleep.
There’s this guy I quite fancy back home, and his absence is a growing weight on my heart, a tiresome nocturnal debate. Travel? Man? Travel? Man?
Do I get a job and live the globetrotting life I have always dreamed of, or do I follow my heart and go home? Either way, my savings are dwindling. I need to make a decision.
I’m tired of these questions that keep me awake. I have composed letters to my parents, to this patient and charming man, but I haven’t had the courage to send them. I close my eyes, hoping for an epiphany.
From the corner of my eye, a shaft of light grows warm and strong beside me. I have felt this light before. It came from my grandfather’s office, when I stood in the hallway all those years ago as a little girl. Now, it comes behind me, wrapping me in its warm glow, a cloak of love round my shoulders. It speaks to me, and I start to cry.
Do what makes you happy.
My grandfather is watching over me.
I feel loved and safe, and not so alone.
I sleep like the dead. In the morning, I book my flights for home.