Me, wearing my Mickey Mouse hat, in the garden of Digger Murray’s (note: already reading)

It’s a simple wooden house, maybe two or three bedrooms; even in the mid-90s there was still a coal range in the kitchen and a mangle washer in the lean-to laundry. It’s a kiwi house: nothing too flash. In our family, it was always called Digger Murray’s house. He had been the landlord of this, my parents first home when they emigrated from the north of England to the south of New Zealand in 1972. Mum was 23 (TWENTY-THREE!) when she had me, within the year. And so Digger Murray’s was also my first home.

It must have been bitterly cold in winter. But I have no memory of that. My earliest memory is of sunshine: the crunch of small stones under the wheels of my rattly pram, kicking my pudgy white legs, the sound of Mum singing as she pushed me. I remember looking up and seeing the press-button (presbyterian) church but not being able to see the spire in the too bright sun. We had just crossed the road from Digger’s, heading for the shops of Waikouaiti (population in 1975: about 2500).

~

I spent the 12th of October 1996 in Oamaru. I remember because it was the date of New Zealand’s first MMP Election, and the couple who owned The Mill House where we stayed, were proudly displaying their blue ribbons. They assumed we supported National and Mum went along with the joke (we made fun of the ‘crazy pinko liberals’ that just caused a stir. Given Mum was, I believe, a Union Rep at the time, this was very funny). The trip was completely out of character; Mum had called on Saturday afternoon and suggested we get away for the night. I remember the long drive up the coast, stopping at Moeraki. We spent a few happy hours at Slightly Foxed, a secondhand bookstore in Oamaru. On our way back to Dunedin on Sunday, we detoured off State Highway 1 through Waikouaiti. As we followed the usual route to the beach, taking in all four of ‘The Waikouaiti Houses’, real estate agent balloons signaled Digger Murray’s was having an open home.

For the next hour, Mum took me through every room, explaining how excited she was to bring me home from the hospital, where she put my bassinet, the sink I was first bathed in. She lit up that house. I was able to see her differently for the first time; as a young woman with a brand new baby, thousands of miles from all she had ever known, without her own mother around (who had died when Mum was just 14). How terrifying that must have been. At 23! ‘You were so wanted, so loved: don’t ever forget that!’

It was startling, a rift in space-time: in 1996, I was 23. I could barely get myself to late morning lectures.

I never questioned why she had wanted to take that trip, it didn’t seem like the adventurous whim she had made out: maybe she was running from something, maybe that was my father, maybe because I have no relationship with him now, I just want that to be true. It doesn’t really matter.

The timing and the memories are gifts.

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