Phys Ed

A few brief prologues:
a) A monarch butterfly drifted in twice this afternoon through the open French sliders. Why my concern for its well-being? The scale of values we apply to things.
b) I’m a terrible proof-reader. Trouble is I learnt to speed read as a youth. I skim down a page looking for meaning. So I often miss spelling mistakes. I see in yesterday’s Gibbon piece I imply New Zealand has had no wars. I meant in my lifetime & not on our soil. I have never heard the sounds of guns fired in anger.
c) Monday was our wedding anniversary – 24 years. 30 years actually together. A lot of memories. We celebrated with food. Melon and prosciutto with a drizzle of lemon for lunch – one of the most divine flavour combinations - and Cloudy Bay oysters followed by grilled salmon fillets for dinner.
d) I spellchecked prosciutto. It suggested prostitute

Phys Ed

District High Schools increased five-fold in numbers between 1894 and 1914, part of a spectacular development after Seddon’s government offered secondary school free places. Historians tend to be cynical about Seddon’s education reform giving credit to Hogben for them. Seddon’s mother was a school-teacher, like many under-educated people he may have valued it more than we imagine. Holyoake is rather similar. The secondary part of Akaroa opened in 1901, and the manual training section in 1908 near the smaller wharf. When I went there as a student the school reflected different education architectural styles. The manual rooms, with their high stud and small windows with no view except the sky, contrasted with the new, airy secondary block built in 1936 at the south end of the town. For a while students from the outer bays stayed in a hostel for the week, but it had been replaced by a school bus service round the harbour. Parents from outlying eastern bays brought their sons and daughters over to link up with this service, or else privately boarded them in Akaroa.

Mrs Brocherie’s where I boarded had blue penguins nesting under her coal shed. When I filled up the coal bucket there was this great racket as the parents chattered their alarm. To get to Akaroa I caught the Christchurch-Akaroa Road Service bus at Little River just before 9 on Monday morning. This meant not arriving at school till after 10. In this double period Geometry was taught, so all my subsequent life I have been deficient in this area of maths. At the time this seemed irrelevant. The bus left at 3 30 pm on Friday for the return trip.

The first lessons stressed the town's history. In August 1838 a French whaler, Captain L'Anglois, purchased Banks Peninsula from the local Maori. Back in France there was talk of establishing a penal colony, but eventually this faded and 63 settlers, including a few Germans, (two of whom are ancestors) set sail in February 1840. They arrived on 13 August, two days after the French frigate L'Aube under Commodore Lavaud, but importantly three days after the British, Captain Stanley on the H.M.S. Britomart. To us it was presented as a dramatic race, the British just arrived in the nick of time to prevent the French claiming the South Island. According to Miss Greenwood, Lavaud let slip to Governor Hobson the frigate's destination and his nation's plans. "in his cups." She seized the opportunity to elaborate on the perils of the demon drink. Otherwise we would be speaking French. Historically the race is not true, but it makes a good tale and a splendid way of gaining attention. We also knew what the whole town knew, Miss Greenwood liked her gin and tonic.

Though the French settlement had all the problems of all early settlements - land to be cleared, no grain or vegetables for a while, and even when crops were mature seed had to be kept for the next planting - it was a safe anchorage for whaler and sealer. Once the settlers got established they could supply passing ships. This led to shipbuilding. In fact timber became the main industry. Old weatherboard houses at Akaroa still revealed pit-sawn timber.

The department had two teachers. Mr Arnold ran the big room where Science, Maths, Agriculture and History were taught. It had a row of science sinks along the north wall, a locked cupboard of chemicals and a fume box. That room always held the lingering smell of a lab. He retired half-way through my time there to be replaced by Mr Mahar. Miss Greenwood ran the second room - English, Social Studies, Geography, Art, Music and Horticulture. A bright boy I did well in both rooms.
The department was very run down, especially in equipment. During my fourth form year, after the inspectors had spent time in the two classrooms, they remained closeted with the two teachers and the primary principal for ages. Sensing something was up, we played impromptu games outside until a very grim-faced Miss Greenwood called us in. Years later I learnt the reason. Apparently Miss Tindall, who had reduced me to tears at my inability to solve a physics problem – I’d got the right answer intuitively, but she believed I’d cheated - declared her unwillingness to sign the certificates for the practical science course and had been extremely critical of the physical education programme. She was talked into signing by Mr Mahar on agreement to get new equipment and materials. Box after box arrived to be excitedly opened and stored under his direction. As a lab monitor I happily helped him label and shelve.

When Miss Tindall came back a year latter Mr Mahar prepared well. He etherised a frog, and rather nervously opened it up to expose its living heart. The process was just getting interesting when dramatically a girl fainted, followed by two of the boys sitting down expressing feelings of wobbliness. In the ensuring mayhem the lesson was forgotten. What Miss Tindall said on this occasion is not known. Mr Mahar went up in our estimation - he took the fight to the enemy.

Mr Arnold let us play sports during phys ed time. I liked the tennis – my primary school had the local courts alongside so I’d learnt to play, but cricket and rugby were nerve-wracking. The two best boys would toss and then pick in turn those they wanted to play in their team. Nervously I waited to see when I would be picked. Being picked near the end was not a lesson in confidence. In rugby I was well-down the list. Cricket was not quite so bad. With a reasonable eye and reflexes, shoulders powerful from swinging an axe, I was usually frustratingly caught after a few lusty blows. Mr Mahar did attempt to show us how to hold a bat and bowl a ball and he gave us catching practice. Most of the boys considered this a waste of time, they wanted to get on and play. Secretly I disagreed, and regretted not having improved those skills earlier.

The new phys education equipment including a vaulting horse which I loathed. We actually had to jump over the bloody thing. After I'd baulked several times Mr Mahar would stand beside it to help me over, a process which usually ended crushing my testicles against the saddle. In agony I would go back to try again. The tumbling mats were OK, though graceful I never was. My destiny lacked the words ‘physical prowess’. One would never have guessed that I would end up in charge of PE syllabus revision when I was Assistant Director, Curriculum Development in the old Department of Education

I enjoyed this responsibility immensely, members of the working party included national players, (including Jeremy Coney one of the wittiest men I’ve ever met), top coaches and high level administrators as well as teachers and university people, all very bronzed and fit. Unbeknown to them I carried a recollection from my inspector days when I was as experienced as three years in the job could make one. A liaison visit was to Matakana District High School on the island that separates Tauranga Harbour from the ocean. A new inspector whose specialty was physical education had just started in the Hamilton team. "Take Joe Hughes with you," my boss said, “show him the ropes.” We jet-boated across the harbour to the small school. Joe did a better job than I at eating the kina, which the locals provided for lunch.

Last period of the day was physical education. "I look forward to that", Joe said. I stayed talking to the principal while he went down to the harbour to watch the swimming lesson. He came back, his eyes on stalks. Apparently the whole school, nearly all Maori, had stripped naked, the elder pupils helping the younger ones and then all dived into the sea and waded or swam across to a small island where they sat eating blackberries and splashing in the shallows. At the whistle they all swam back, the elder pupils then drying and dressing the small ones and shyacking back to school. "It was lovely, the closest thing to Eden I'll ever see", Joe said. "But was it Phys Ed?" I asked. "It was life", Joe replied; who throughout his stint in the inspectorate infuriated and amused us all by his eager one-eyed advocacy for his cause. As the committee discussed objectives, learning experiences and the best ways to teach eye/hand co-ordination I polished that memory, life’s winners and losers. Education has a tendency to inflationary earnestness that loses friends.

Gibbon

I have always been aware how fragile the veneer of civilisation is. It was my good fortune to be born in a country that has not known war, famine or tyranny. I was reminded of this by the two books I’m reading at present. One is This Is London Calling, Good Evening by George Angeloglou. The other is The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation by Bryan Ward-Perkins. The first is the story of the Greek Section of the BBC 1939-57. It was lent to us by our neighbours, the husband’s sister married Angelogloua. He was in control of the BBC Greek Section during the war and after. There are graphic accounts of the Blitz and broadcasting during Britain’s ‘finest hour’. I’ve always found it hard to reconcile the glories of Mozart and Beethoven with the horrors of Belsen.

The Ward-Perkins book reiterates the Gibbon argument, that the Barbarian invasions ushered in the Dark Ages. It ends:
‘There is a real danger for the present day in a vision of the past that explicitly sets out to eliminate all crisis and decline. The end of the Roman West witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through: and it destroyed a complex civilisation, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times. Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.’

In my second year teaching I bought at Pauls Book Arcade in Hamilton an abridged copy of Gibbons famous history of the decline of the Roman Empire. Magnificent prose! I’ve read it four times. It shaped my world-view – the Greek/Roman world overthrown by the invading hordes from the north in the west and the remaining empire in the east becoming decadent and no longer Roman. That idea has been challenged recently. The barbarians became Roman citizens and carried on the values. Ward-Perkins rebuts this, restoring the Gibbon thesis.

His is essentially a pessimistic view. I’ve been conscious all my adult life of the possibilities of a nuclear war that would wipe out much of our civilisation. It is easy to foresee water wars and more oil wars. But I never conceived an economic and fiscal meltdown of the magnitude we appear to be facing. It could destroy much of what we take for granted. Will some historian in several centuries time write of our civilisation as Gibbon did of Rome?

Freud Would Have Had A Field-Day

Freud Would Have A Field Day

My earliest memory
aged four or maybe three
I watched my father dig
a hole for the dunny can
chooks scratching
the shovelled earth
just as the contents
were tipped in the big
Rhode Island red rooster
slipped & tumbled.
Unable to get out its
struggles increased its
fouling. My father hauled
it out upside down &
one-handedly working
the pump washed it
Released the bedraggled
fowl dragged itself to
the shed. Suddenly
a new hero in the yard.
the little subdued bantam
rooster began to crow

NCEA

When people learn that I’ve worked in education all my life they often ask my opinion – not in general but particularly assessment and curriculum. "You were an English teacher. What do you think about the decline of grammar?" Let’s park that one for a later blog. Let’s look at assessment.
I failed my first driver’s licence test. I was a university student. My stepfather had paid for lessons. But doing a u-turn on a Cashmere hill street in Christchurch I got the wheel stuck in the gutter and couldn’t back out. A few weeks later I had another go, This time I passed. But by no means was I a competent and effective driver. Seventeen years later I was appointed as an Inspector of Secondary Schools. Part of my preparation was a defensive driving course. The instructor complemented me upon my driving and said I was a natural defensive driver. I had learnt a lot of lessons along the way.
As a secondary school inspector I saw many science lessons. Every now and then an experiment didn’t work. And to have a ‘beak’ - as we were known - in the room as well, what a situation.. Basically, teachers had two methods of coping with this circumstance. The first was to explain what should have happened, write it up on the board and the students copied it down and were told to learn it for the exams. The others tried to get the kids to analyse why the experiment had failed. The fortunate ones could try again. Those, whose resource had been consumed in the first attempt, used chalk and talk, often some good lessons.
I thought of those experiences when I read the Royal Society in England has slammed top science school exams there on the grounds that they failed to prepare young people for the world of work or for university. The Society claimed that the exams concentrated on a narrow range of skills and a regurgitating of facts rather than encouraging students to experiment. It said: "we need a system of assessment that fuels pupils’ enthusiasm for the subject by opening up this exciting world of problem solving, discovery and innovation while at the same time supporting factual learning."
School exams were a holy cow in our society. People berate me about the so-called removal of exams. "I sat School C and it did me no harm." "What good did it do you?" "I’d three passes". "What had you learnt?" That’s the question that usually stumps them. They’d learnt to pass exams. Schools are about learning and we keep forgetting that. We tend to get so obsessed with assessments and measurement that we forget the many other reasons why schools exist.
Education is the human attempt to put systems and resources into place to assist learning – and if we are honest, to control it. Learning is something we all do. Learning has always been life-long, and increasingly education is seen as such. We learn by failure as well as success. Indeed, failure is the norm - at first. A child learning to walk falls many times before he or she confidently stays upright. We learn individually, but we also learn together. We learn by moving from the known to the unknown. Secondary teachers work with young people who are making the transition from dependence to independence. Becoming fully human means at some stage taking responsibility for your own learning needs – present jargon is, to take ownership.
The National Certificate in Educational Achievement, NCEA, has been promoted by successive governments. It’s an attempt to have a more sensible assessment of student learning and achievement, an essential building block for a knowledge society. It is an attempt to provide what the Royal Society calls the "exciting world of problem solving, discovery and innovation." Admittedly, the method of implementation created some problems. Discussion – sometimes heated - about that implementation clouded the basic issue.
In a midden near Hadrian’s Wall in the U.K. a child’s lesson from the second century A.D. was unearthed - a very poor copy of a passage from Virgil. At the bottom the teacher had scrawled, "sloppy". History doesn’t tell us whether an accurate copy was ever done. But we know a lot more about learning now. Schools exist to assist learning. We need to remember that when we talk about student failure and success.

MUM

My mother’s first husband, a farmer, was killed, thrown off his horse when I was five. Seven years later Mum remarried. Dick my stepfather, a returned soldier, also died young, of lung cancer. She lived alone for 35 years after that, never voicing the grief I've sensed in her. The dislocation of loss is the theme of her later life. It prematurely aged her, not just physically but socially. Young widowhood was frequent in the 19th century, but much less so in the later 20th. Still, she’d married two of the most eligible young men in Little River. Photos reveal a striking young woman.
She pre-existed me for over 22 years. It’s hard for me to imagine those years. Young and supple, she and her brothers were good at climbing trees. They’d collect sparrow eggs, blow them and when they had a shoe-box full they’d take them to the county office to collect a bounty. Gravely the clerk would count the eggs, pay them, enter the transaction in a register and then crush the box. She played knucklebones and marbles with her school mates. But her dreams and desires are lost. I’ve asked her once about the courtship of John McQueen. "We just went out together." That’s what people did then – they became a number, a step along the way to a church wedding, a honeymoon, and a family. I experienced the wooing of Dick Lee. My presence must have been a trial to them. I was a clingy child, the loss of a father didn’t help. The fact I have so many fond memories of Dick suggests she choose a good man.
"I've had a good trot," she says. As a life draws to an end there is the need to keep perspective – the events and experiences of a lifetime. Mum was born in 1912. So much has happened. She started life before the welfare state was envisaged. During her mature years it was constructed and now in her twilight years it has been partially dismantled. We are all part of history – it’s not just kings and queens, battles and pageants. That continuity thing.
She has never left our shores. But during her lifetime our isolation has dramatically lessened. She often recalls the day Kingsford Smith landed at Wigram after the first successful cross-Tasman plane flight. The family had been listening to the radio. Pop, her father, suddenly said we'll go through and see him land. Granny said she hadn’t done the dishes and Pop said "blow the dishes." They got there from Little River just in time to see the plane land. Mum's elder brother Charley climbed up the steps and looked inside. Mum touched the fuselage. "I wish I'd gone up those steps." She was there at the beginning of a new era.
She was fleet-footed, winning the hundred-yard married women's race at Little River sports meetings year after year. The same agility would see her on the farm racing across the paddock to head off a breaking flock of lambs. Dick said she was as good as his best heading dog. During the war-years she made all her, my brother Doug’s and my clothes as well as knitting khaki mittens, balaclavas, socks and scarves for the troops. She was always gardening, even right up until recently.
Now she is frail and bent. But I recall radiance and exuberance at the farm at the top of Okuti, a valley off Little River in Banks Peninsula, In 1947 she and Dick moved there. Leaving the township, the road skirted across the head of Lake Forsyth before turning up the valley, past the school and tennis courts, crisscrossing the bush-covered creek several times until it reached our cattle-stop. The gradient then steepened as it wound past our cattle-yards and the old bullock wagon - a rusting relic of pioneering days - before bursting out at the top of a ridge in front of our house. The farm was at the head of the valley. It was a place of country silence, though the rooster's call heralded every morning. Valleys, like islands, form a unity. This one provided shelter and challenge. Years later when I studied Wordsworth’s poetry and read what he claimed about the healing power of Nature his ideas made sense - Okuti.
The farm was run-down, over-grown with primary manuka and kanuka, the fences dilapidated, the yards in need of repair, the house in need of paint and maintenance. Part of the condition of the rehab loan was that the house be painted. Two painters from Christchurch moved in with us soon after we shifted. Dick and Mum fretted while they burnt off - frightened their blowtorches would leave a smouldering spark in the tinder-dry weatherboards. Crotchety men they didn't want two kids underfoot or playing near their ladders. Turning their blowtorch around they'd shout "Get to hell out of here or I'll burn you to a cinder". We'd scramble but not for long - their activities were too fascinating. One lit his hand-rolled cigarettes from the burner. Then an old mouse nest did catch fire. "Hey kid, get the hose here quick." I obliged. He was running round in small circles when Mum quickly arrived to assist me with the hose. She put the blaze out. The house survived. "Townies" she muttered as she went back inside.
Money was extremely short. In Dick's words we "lived on the smell of a oily rag'. Her labour was an essential component in those early days on the farm. She loved being out with him, active duty I think it could be called, a soldier’s terminology for it was a form of combat. Young as I was I sensed her blossoming. She looked after Dick's hearty appetite, tended her sons, did the washing - copper and tub at first - and housework, fed the lambs and the occasional calf, took care of the chooks, made butter and provided coherence and comfort to our lives. Her farm-work was interrupted by two pregnancies, twin boys, and then thirteen months later another son. The three youngsters bound her more to the house. Often I was called to hang nappies on the line, jiggle a child to stop him crying, burp up wind or rock to sleep. Trying to get a small child to eat mashed up vegetables proved challenging. They would watch with interest as I ate a spoonful (an experience that has put me off spinach for life), and then present me a tightly closed mouth and shaking head. Pups and piglets just tucked in; obviously human babies needed teaching or maybe the food tasted nasty. "Just get on and feed them," Mum would say when I raised such questions.

Scott

On New Year’s Eve in 1911 five men sat talking in their tent on the Antarctic Plateau for over four hours. They were Robert Falcon Scott and his fellow-officers. In the nearby tent the Petty Officers kept their own company. A naval officer, Scott stuck to the rules of the class system within which he had grown up. Teddy Evans, the only man in the tent to get back alive to Base Camp describes the camaraderie of that evening. At the end Scott reached across and squeezed the arm of Oates, who’d been reminiscing about his childhood, teasing the soldier about coming out of his shell. Oates had a reputation as being taciturn. They had reasons to be content. They were on schedule. They had seen no sign of the Norwegian party for they wrongly assumed Amundsen would use the Beardmore Glacier, the route the English had pioneered. Little did they realise he’d found an alternative route, reached the South Pole and was already returning north. Unlike his group Scott’s party did not survive the assault on the Pole. Unfortunately for them they were destined to face one of the coldest autumns the continent has experienced.

Captain Scott is part of my mental folklore. I have never been to Antarctica but during my formative years the Little River public library and Akaroa District High School library held many books about Scott and Shackleton’s expeditions. I devoured them all. Names like Bowers, Crean and Ponting were part of my mental furniture. There was no reality TV then. My entertainment was books about these and other similar epic journeys. Bowers and Cherry-Garrard’s valiant efforts to save the ponies trapped on floating ice floes and surrounded by killer whales is an example. Oates saying "I am just going outside and may be some time," sacrificing himself in an effort to ensure the other three got through And then the final tragedy – Scott and his two companions dying in a tent – gentlemen to the end, courageous and decent. Throughout my adult life I’ve continued to read new books about their exploits.

Recently I read Ranulph Fiennes’s Captain Scott. When I was young, Scott was extolled as a hero, indeed an imperial role-model. Then there was a debunking period – the foolish leader whose enterprise was a disaster waiting to happen. Now the pendulum has swung back. Fiennes manhandled a sledge through the same territory. He feels entitled to make judgements about Scott – on the whole favourable. A few years ago I read a similar book, Canadian meteorologist, Susan Solomon’s The Coldest March. She argues from the scientific evidence that Scott’s returning polar group struck one of the coldest recorded autumns. Temperatures plummeted as the final assault party returned – undoubtedly dispirited at finding the Norwegians had beaten them. Solomon also made a point I had not grasped. If Wilson and Bowers had left Scott alone and pressed on they had a good chance of making One Ton Depot, picking up supplies and maybe – a very big maybe - rescuing him. We have turned full circle and returned to the heroic age. Her theory was that being the men they were, Wilson and Bowers chose to stay and die with their leader. Fiennes is less sanguine about their prospects. But he agrees with the heroic re-assessment of Scott.

That legend was part of my childhood. Dying, Wilson wrote to his wife. "The Barrier has beaten us – though we got to the Pole." Scott penned a ‘Message to the Public". "Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman."

At school, teachers had us copy out that final message. In Christchurch, Mum pointed out his statue sculpted by his wife on the banks of the Avon. "She didn’t finish it you know." One of the first books I personally bought was the Penguin Ashley Gerrard-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World. I still have it, battered, marmite-stained and dog-eared. Scott sailed both times from Lyttleton – our port. People I knew had seen his ships set off. Relics from his huts were in the Christchurch musuem. Later, the Globemaster planes servicing the American and Kiwi bases at McMurdo Sound left Harewood aerodrome for the long trip south and their noisy flight as they lumbered south echoed up Okuti valley where my stepfather and mother farmed.

That early hero-worship was under-cut to the extent that most people were critical of Scott’s decision to take four others instead of the planned three. But the brave way he faced defeat and death was held up as a virtue to be emulated. The Second World War was happening. Bravery was in demand. Sacrifice was needed. The connection between the virtues Scott and his colleagues practised and the carnage of the First World War was rarely made. Gallipoli, Dunkirk, the British are at their best when their backs are to the wall. That was the message our teachers gave us. My reading reinforced the message. Of course Mallory and Norton got to the top of Everest. Like Scott they’d challenged the elements and lost, but bravely. That’s what men did.
Once I was in the bath listening to the radio. The late news came on. The Argentineans had landed on South Georgia claimin it was no longer British. I felt a surge of completely unexpected imperialism. In my mind that desolate little spot was associated with Shackleton and British pluck and daring. I recalled that Akaroa primary class listening with attention as I told of the story of Shackleton and his four crew men sailing the James Caird, an open boat, from Elephant Island to the south coast of South Georgia through the stormy south Atlantic ocean, and then climbing over unexplored mountains to get aid at the Norwegian whaling station. They had to get through to bring help to their marooned comrades. I was never a fan of Margaret Thatcher’s. But I cheered when her troops ‘liberated’ South Georgia.

Reading Scott’s diaries I am struck by how confident he was about the British Empire. He was a loyal naval officer in that Empire. His career reflected its zenith. His death was during my childhood used as one of the definitions of that Empire. The words glory and duty hovered round his story. There is an irony in that the British were not the first to reach either Pole. Would he have been such a hero if he’d survived – after all he’d come second. Scott’s valour, loyalty to his companions, diligent planning were all held out as role models. His bravery at the onset of death was the very model of appropriate behaviour. Did he bully Oates into crawling outside? Such a question was unthinkable then.

For the flip side of the myth of Scott is that the various manifestations of "stiff upper lip" helped create the carnage of the First World War. Discipline meant that orders were not questioned – or disobeyed. The English class system still prevailed. Being British meant muddling through. Right equals might and thus will succeed. The fall of Singapore was a shattering blow to my elder’s myths of Empire. The old claims suddenly began to ring hollow. ‘The whole British navy couldn’t fit into Akaroa Harbour’, "The sun always shines somewhere on the Empire." So it was no surprise that a period of debunking set in. It pleases me that Fiennes restored some balance.
But the hierarchical symbols of the two tents still rankles. It clashes with some deep semse of Kiwi fairness.

Miss Greenwood

Miss Greenwood

In the two-teacher secondary department at Akaroa District High School Miss Greenwood taught English, Geography, Art, Music and Horticulture. The school gardens won prizes for the best in Canterbury - she worked long hours in them and lessons saw our labour put to use. ("What do you do in horticulture?" Mum asked. "Shovel horse shit", I replied.) Miss Greenwood opened up new worlds of art, music, and literature. For a bookworm boy she’s just what the life-doctor ordered. Here is a poem of belated acknowledgment:

Blast me for an idiot
when Miss Greenwood put on
Jesu joy of man's desiring
spurred by the rest
I sounded "yuk"
her look of pain
her brilliant student
a ZB upbringing no excuse
my audience built by challenging hers
never questioned next door, Sticky's H20
she had her revenge
she hustled us to orchestra
Strauss, Sibelius
& on the bus coming home
Finlandia bouncing in every bone
I was hooked and delivered scaled
She once said looking straight at me
"You're not fully adult until you love Mozart."
a teacher's success can never be measured
too late now, but I apologise Miss Greenwood
third movement scherzo (allegro vivace.

After playing seven-a-side rugby at Hagley Park we went to the National Orchestra. The bruises from the morning's rugby forgotten I was rapt.
We had two poetry books, Mount Helicon and Grass from Parnassus. I still have them both - one bought school texts then. She took us through them, we chanted poems together, we chose a stanza, copied it out and illustrated it. I pored over both books at night. (I didn’t tell my classmates about this. I sensed their disapproval or at least misunderstanding). Many lines remain, a layer in my literary midden: "There's a breathless hush on the close tonight"; ""The Albatross fell off and sank like lead into the sea"; "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree"; "Oh England is a pleasant place for them that's rich and high."
Miss Greenwood’s conviction that poetry counted proved contagious – it entered my bloodstream, though an opportunity was missed - we talked about the poems and ideas in them, but she never suggested I write poems nor did she give any creative writing lessons.
But she did something else that was important for me. There was only one New Zealand poem in the two anthologies - Pember Reeves, "God girt her about with the surges" with its borrowed diction. To make up that deficiency she put up on the blackboard - no banda or zerox in those days - for us to copy New Zealand poems, Dora Wilcox's Onawe, McKee Wright's Arlington and Blanche Baughan's The Old Place. All deal with questions of displacement and change as well as reflecting the pioneer values of my childhood. [What I didn’t realise was that they also contained their own indoctrination] But they represented an attempt to speak the language of our place. Poetry could be about places I knew. Onawe, the pear-shaped peninsula at the head of the harbour where we fished for flounder, was where Te Rauparaha swept down from the north to capture and destroy the local pah.

...Here once the Haka sounded; and din of battle
Shook the grey crags,
Triumphant shout and agonized death-rattle
Startled the shags...
Tena koe Pakeha! within this fortification
Grows English grass -
Tena koe! subtle conqueror of a nation
Doomed, doomed to pass!

Arlington - Granddad McQueen once managed a station like that and in his cups in his declining years bewailed the passing of that way of life.

...The good old boss of Arlington was everybody's friend,
He liked to keep the wages up right to the very end;
If diggers' horses went astray they always could be found
The cow that roamed across the run was never in the pound.
He was a white man through and through, cheery and fair and plain,
And now he'll never ride the rounds of Arlington again...

The Old Place, was the world I knew - summer droughts and winter floods, the Bush Paddock and old-timers gossiping about the room where Mary died and John...

...Yes well! I'm leaving the place. Apples look red on that bough.
I set the slips with my own hand. Well - they're another man's now.
The breezy bluff: an' the clover that smells so over the land
Drowning the reek of the rubbish that plucks the profit out o' your hand:

Poetry was not something from the other side of the world. Poems could be made in New Zealand. I was fascinated to learn that the old lady slowly pedaling around on a creaky bicycle was Blanche Baughan. Writers were actual people. And New Zealanders too. I mentioned this to Miss Greenwood. She lent me a book by a woman called Mansfield. I struggled to read the stories. They had no story, no plot. Miss Greenwood said that one day I’d understand.

The slips that she helped plant have lasted my lifetime.