Pop's Hill

'There is time
to tell you
the only story I know;
a youth sets out,
a man or woman returns,
the rest is simply incident
or weather.'

American poet Linda Pastan’s correct. But along the way we enjoy great learning.

Learning is something all human beings do. We learn by observation, experience, practice and precept. It enables us as humans to create myth, metaphor and meaning. We learn best when we have a reason to learn. Education is the human attempt to structure that learning, sometimes to control it. Whoever decides what is education - how it is delivered, who learns what, where and how – possesses great influence. At one stage education was the preserve of a fortunate few. Now it is seen as an individual right and a national necessity.

On fine days - which in Wellington are more frequent than the city’s critics allow - I used to walk from my hillside home to the city, down Garden Road and across the Botanic Gardens. Once I caught up with a small schoolboy and his older sister. They seemed engaged in serious conversation until suddenly he started hopping on two legs.
"Why are you doing that?" she asked.
"’Cause I'm a rabbit," he responded.
"I don't want you to be a rabbit. They don't talk."
"I can be a talking rabbit. Can’t I?"

Such innocence and assurance! I chased the thought of being a child again, of returning to – no, was it such a magical time? Such a restoration would mean giving up a lifetime’s experience and learning. The boy that I once was is now an elusive creature.

Certain memories, however, remain clear. After my grandfather Pop bought a small cottage at the edge of his farm for widowed Mum and her two sons, I explored his farm, expeditions I called them, a big word discovered in Winnie the Pooh. The creek that ran past our place tugged my curiosity to its source, a small rush-surrounded, boggy spring just below the summit of a high hill. By the time it had reached us it had slowed - a lazy series of deep pools with quick-moving cockabullies, gaudy summer dragonflies skimming the surface, and sometimes a glimpse of eel under the boulders. Kingfishers nested in the tall banks.

Before this, however, the creek came out of a steep gully, where it was a series of tree-fern dappled rapids and sparkling small pools, slippery banks, fallen trunks, moss, sodden leaves, with nearly always a pair of fantails flicking jerkingly around. One could alter the water-course by pulling out a big stone, or divert a channel by blocking it with a dam thereby changing the universe. Human in the midst of a world of plants and stones and running water one could control things. Illusionment is part of learning.

There was usually a half-grown pup to protect one against Red Indians or lawyer bush, except the foolish animal would knock down the half-built dam in its enthusiasm. There were unexpected discoveries - a drowned sheep, a sleeping steer which snorted away, a grey warbler's nest with fledglings.

In spring the kowhai burst into colour and the native clematis sprayed white stars. Tui chortled and fought amidst the nectar-laden flowers, or else a solo flute making even quieter the rest of the bush. In autumn one could feast on konini (native fuchsia) berries, the plump native pigeons reluctant to fly away as one clambered up to join them. I pushed one off a bough once to see what it would do - lumbering into flight it circled back to settle inches from my head and continue its feast. I stroked its soft plumage as it gorged on.

Leaving the cover of the trees one could strike uphill, over slip and sheep-track, past lone cabbage trees and strutting Californian quail until one reached the top. There I would lie down in a tussock and having plucked the bibibibi from my socks and the pup's coat, eye from this eyrie Pop's house down below. Beyond that were the railway yards, the tiny township, the flats with their kahikatea trees, the willow-shrouded river, the Pa, (a road with a dozen or so Maori families, the remnants of the much larger numbers who had once lived here), behind it the gorse-covered hill.

Pop's hill had been gorse overgrown like that. The previous owners having gone bankrupt he picked it up for a song just before the Depression. He got men on Government assistance, students with blistered hands, insolvents who had lost their own businesses or laid-off office workers to clear the gorse off the new place. Mum cooked for 8 men and the family all summer. She left high school to do it. Now Pop could keep it under control with a few week’s grubbing each year.

One farmer's wife said gorse was beautiful, what a shame it had to be burnt, and what about the poor birds? Granny said scornfully, "she's a townie, what does she know about it?" I watched from Pop's hill when they burnt the other side - huge flames under great plumes of smoke billowing up to provide a hazy sun with a corona. There were magpies nesting in the pines in the middle of the gorse. Next spring the gorse regrew but the pines, which had flared spectacularly stood dead, and the magpies sought another plantation to try again. Nowadays all that gorse has gone, vanquished by herbicide.