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| Lime Street Station, Liverpool, 03 Jan. 1969 |
In the picture I am fourteen-and-a-half. At that age it was
still important to me to count in half-years because it made me sound closer to
fifteen. I don’t do it any more – telling anyone who’ll listen that I’m
sixty-four-and-a-half is futile, and anyway I’d rather be closer to sixty three.
Or twenty three come to that.
People today still ask, why did you go to New Zealand? Sometimes
I ask myself the same question, but only when I stand back to observe my life’s
choices dispassionately. Was it the right thing to do? Certainly. Could I have
stayed in the UK? Yes to that too, but such speculation is a waste of time, and
I might not have much of that left; Facebook adverts keep reminding me to
pre-plan my funeral. Maybe they know something I don’t.
So, how did we come to emigrate? Blame me, it was my
decision. It’s a long story, but after losing one husband to sudden death and a
second to divorce, my mother had devoted her life to bringing me up, while also
looking after my ailing alcoholic granny and holding down a job with HM Customs
in Liverpool. She deserved a medal, but somehow the honours list always
overlooked her.
Anyway, after a long illness my granny died in 1967. It was,
it has to be said, a relief for both of us. Suddenly my mother had some freedom,
which was seized upon by a once-spurned suitor of hers who had earlier left the
UK to live in New Zealand. His name was John, and he was an outdoors hunting,
shooting, fishing type. He had kept in touch with Mum by correspondence (aerogrammes,
remember them?), in which he’d occasionally renewed his offer of marriage, but
which she’d always – of necessity – turned down. There was no way my
grandmother was going to survive the trip to New Zealand, and anyway, I was
still at school.
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| The mountain formerly known as Egmont |
But with no elderly invalid to care for any more, my Mum
received yet another marriage proposal and saw it perhaps as a ‘final demand’.
This was some time in 1968. One morning – a Saturday if I remember rightly – she
came into my bedroom where I was languishing in teenage torpor (it was probably actually
3pm) and said, ‘How would you like to go to New Zealand?’
That was the gist of it anyway. She went on to explain about
John, this former shipping clerk who had taken a shine to her seventeen years
previously in Liverpool, whom she had spurned. He had gone to New Zealand and
joined the forestry service, then later the NZ police force. He was now a
sergeant and based in some place called New Plymouth, a coastal town dominated
by what was then called Mount Egmont, a dormant volcano slightly smaller but of
Mount Fuji-like proportions. Today it is called Mount Taranaki and wears a more
indigenous cloak of respectability, but that’s another story.
I digress. There was no pressure from my mother to make a
decision. She laid out the proposal and left me to think about it, but
one thing she made very clear: it would be my
decision. If I wanted to go we’d go, and if I didn’t we’d stay. This was a big choice
for a fourteen (and-a-half) year-old, and I look back on it as a momentous
occasion. Our whole future was put in my hands. It was the biggest decision of
my life. I was – and still am – proud that I was given such a big say in our
lives, possibly the biggest.
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| The clock's ticking: decision time |
You’ll be thinking right now that Mum was a liberal,
far-seeing soul who was way ahead of her time, and you might be right. The reality
is that I was at high school, and for the first time in my scholarly life I was
actually starting to do quite well. Not brilliantly, but I was finally making
progress (my reports had typically said
things like, ‘Could try harder’, and ‘Michael finds this subject difficult’)
and after some dismal years I was enjoying myself at school, and had made some
great friends. My future was looking bright, so what would happen if I
suddenly threw all that away and moved 12,000 miles to a new life?
I did research. I studied anything I could find about New
Zealand, which wasn’t much. There was no Internet, so I was restricted to
whatever was in the library, which largely meant geography books in which New
Zealand was always accorded a frustratingly small section. Mum told me of some
of John’s hunting and fishing exploits, which sounded appealing; even at that
age I was keen on rambling, and my friends and I would catch buses to the
countryside and walk across farmland using old outdated guide books. I was also
interested in fishing (though in the absence of a father could never master the
cast – Mum didn’t know how), and I liked golf – in short, I realised that I too
was actually ‘outdoorsy’.
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| The Southern sky was a drawcard |
Another plus – and this was a major one – was that I had an
all-consuming passion for astronomy, and owned a nice 4 1/2-inch telescope
(as with my age the half-inch was very important), so the prospect of the
southern hemisphere night sky with more stars and a lot less light pollution
was a major attraction.
And that was it. Decision made: we’d go. If I gave any
thought to leaving behind my close-knit friends and my increasing popularity at school
(at last) I sadly don’t recall. Maybe having made the choice to leave I just
began looking forward, although I knew I would miss my girlfriend, Janet. She
was a real girlfriend too, and I’d only just got to ‘first base’ with her (I’ll
leave you to guess what that was because the ‘Base Scale’ varies globally and
has not yet been formalised by any authority), so I promised her I’d be back
within three years, at least for a visit. Meanwhile we would keep in touch. (We
sort-of did, but with return aerogramme correspondence taking at
least six weeks this wasn’t easy. I did go back for a few months three years
later, but the flame had died. And anyway, I’d already got way past second base
in NZ).
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| The SS Canberra, P&O Line |
And so, some months later after much planning, organising,
packing, and selling our tiny 17th century cottage, Mum and I found
ourselves at Liverpool’s Lime Street Station boarding the train for London and on
to Southampton, from where the next day we would sail away on the SS Canberra,
the cliffs of England slowly disappearing in the grey, murky January afternoon.
While I know the names of everyone in the photo on the
platform I can’t recall who took the picture. Whoever it was caught me with my
eyes shut momentarily, which is poignant really because the fifty years since
then have disappeared - in the blink of an eye.
(Mike Bodnar has now returned from New Zealand and lives in Surrey)
