Dyson family page - private.

These slides all came randomly from an old basement box…there are pics here from when he was in HK, some of Jaap - and a trip back to NZ to see the family just in time for his sisters’ sports day - plus some hilarious 1980s stuff in NZ and London.

On the writing front, there’s a heap of different bits and bobs Dad worked on as he was getting ill, reminiscing and getting stuff down.

Here’s one of them, unedited and with a few bits he clearly meant to follow up on, talking about how Cartwheels was born and what great adventures their camping holidays were:

Spirit of Cartwheels

I am John, 18 years old, living at home, working as a trainee reporter on the evening daily newspaper. My parents are Jim and Jacky but they call each other ‘Skunko.”  Here I am using Oma and Opa, the names we used when they became grandparents.  My sisters – four of them in five years – are Jocelyn, Jilly, Jenny and Joanna.

We live at the end of Jays Road in Woodlands Park, a bushy and gardeny suburb in the hills west of Auckland, New Zealand.   The road acquired its family name because my father built it in the process of sub-dividing our small farm into quarter-acre building plots.  We kept the best one for ourselves: about eight acres of steep grass and bracken and a lot native bush, or forest. Beyond our boundary the water-catchment area runs for scores of miles along the bush-covered ranges

Hardly 400 yards long, Jays Road ascends a gentle slope then levels out and dead-ends at the foot of a grassy hill where two cracked and sun-faded wooden cartwheels lie against the bracken-covered bank.  A tired signboard swinging from a dog chain under the letterbox on its post says, “Cartwheels.” 

Heading home from work, my creaky old Austin 12 with its cracked leather seats and huge shiny headlamps rattles up the two wheel-tracks of orange clay surfaced with clumps of purple scoria.  At the top of the slope the track emerges into a glen cupped in the side of the hill.  This is our private world.  Nobody can see in because we’re hidden by the low hummocky hills and could run around naked any time, but we can look out over neighbour’s rooftops to the suburbs of Titirangi and the muddy Manukau Harbour beyond. Cartwheels is our oasis.

On the left a grassy slope cropped by goats and sheep rise to the bush-line. The house sprawls on its flat-topped knoll lapped by what might be crashing surf but is actually the spray of monster hydrangea blooms as big as footballs, white and speckled with blue and green.

On the right is a large duck pond, not inviting weedy water as you might expect but a marsh of soft orange clay spiked with rushes, a clump of tall bull rushes and a pair of brilliant yellow mimosas.  Here you pay your dues.  Slow down, roll down the window, lean out , and call “Hello ducks!”

At once all fifty or sixty Peking ducks, white with yellow bills, plus half a dozen muscovies, mallards and geese, answer back in a chorus of happy greetings. 

The noise wakes the two bull terriers.  La Giaconda (Gia), is honey coloured with white markings, and  Botticelli Cherub (Cherry-bum), all white with pink feet.  Tails slashing, they whip down the hill and run beside the car.  A donkey adds its greeting, David Copperfield feeling lonely.  His braying echoes around the valley. Barkis and Peggotty prick up their ears .  Nickleby comes running, his tiny feet dancing and furry forehead flattened by the breeze. 

The drive ends at a turning space in front of the garage.  I park with the nose facing down the hill in case the battery goes flat.  In the coop attached to the outer wall, two grey doves called Confucius and Confusion have a nest going.  The white geese are in the cabbage patch again, ripping out tender green centres, slawtering the cole.   Marmaduke and Montmarency, twin billy goats who used to race over the bed while you made it when they were still fragrant kidlets, need their mooring stakes moved to a better patch of brambles; Hairy-breeks, the stinky old male, sourly regards the world.  Giddy Godiva, the long-haired nanny, has run around her iron stake so many times that the chain is tight and she can’t move more than a foot; it takes hours to disentangle her.  A screeching noise comes from a cardboard box under a parasol on the sun-terrace. I peek between the flaps and this triggers screeches of hungry excitement from the three baby kingfishers I rescued from a hollow in a tree cut down for firewood; Shadrach Meshach and Abednigo need their suppers but how do you feed earthworms down an eye-dropper?

I strip off and flop into the half-round swimming pool. The concrete is very rough, as if laid on with a rake, but the water is clear and clean and cool. It overflows into the duck pond. I jump up to carry the basket heaped with clothes Oma has cropped from the rotary line. She brings me a mug of tea then we hear the distinctive sewing-machine clatter of the old Land Rover labouring up the hill.

“Hello ducks!” Opa calls. A hundred voices quack with joy all over again. The dogs go berserk. Lonny Donegan the kitten opens one eye and Cha-Cha, the little white Arab stallion, dances back and forth behind his fence.

My father stops the car in the driveway, strips off his tie and shirt then everything else, and does a forward roll into the pool, the thick white hair on his chest and arms swirling like transparent kelp in the surf. We built the pool ourselves after putting it to a family vote: do you want lined walls in the sitting room and kitchen or a swimming pool. Unanimous.

The bull terriers run along the concrete edge, barking. At great cost we had Gia mated but she didn’t seem to be pregnant and we forgot about it until one night when she came in out of the rain with a pink and white puppy in her mouth: Botticelli Cherub. A week later we lost her. The Cherub simply disappeared and we were dismayed. Then we heard a squeak -- from inside the hi-fi. The new hi-fi was in a varnished cabinet almost as big as the garage. Somehow the Cherub had wriggled underneath and climbed into the innards, where she sank her little teeth into speakers, wires and valves, shredding everything in sight remarkably failing to kill herself.

Now my father leaps on my back and holds me under the water. He is a big broad-shouldered Dutchman, twice my weight and three times my strength and with police training. I don’t stand a chance but I knew it was coming – because it always does -- and had taken a deep breath. When I come up spluttering the school bus has stopped at the end of the road and the four girls are dawdling up the drive swinging schoolbags. Jilly rubs the nose of her red and white pony, Flicka. Jo is wondering when she can try shearing her black and white lamb. “You have to catch it first, “ Opa reminds her.

“Swim or cold shower,” Oma announces. “Doesn’t matter which but it has to be one or the other.”

“Oh Mum…!”

Suddenly it’s chilly. We have our backs to Australia in the west and the sun is setting fast so now the whole valley in front is in shadow. I slip my bare legs into gumboots to protect them from blackberries and the sticky heads of paspalum grass then wander off with the sledge hammer to untangle the goats’ chains and move their iron pegs, a long job. I stumble on a grassy nest filled with big white eggs. What could they be? I kneel down to get a good look and suddenly I am attacked by a hissing monster that’s biting the back of my neck, pulling my hair, standing on my bare shoulders and flapping huge wings. It’s a mother goose and these are her babies. I back off in a hurry. Didn’t know a goose could hurt so much. Scary.

The ducks and geese are given handfuls of corn. The horses and donkeys get some hay. The cats yowl around the fridge door. The dogs give the chilli jar a wide berth: this stuff is so incredibly hot that the greaseproof paper under the lid is burned a dark brown. When Opa dropped a chilli on the floor the other day Gia snatched it up and gulped it down. On fire, she ran screaming up the hill with her tail between her legs and didn’t come home for two days.

I get home covered in goosebumps from the chill but the black pot-belly stove is leaking a few wisps of white smoke and there’s a smell of pine cones in the air. As it begins to roar, Opa settles down with the paper, a big fluffy red towel around his shoulders and pools of water forming beneath both feet. “Haven’t you kids got homework to do?” he asks sternly.

The house. On paper it’s a dream house. Long, low, ranch-style with French windows opening on to a terrace and barbecue fireplace at the front with swimming pool beyond. Windows at the back open into the ferns and palms of the bush. Built of timber and painted the dark red of a Canadian barn, it happened like this.

For years our parents pored over graph paper, backs of envelopes and old school exercise books filled with plans and sketches. Bitter arguments raged about silly details. The land was just a flattened hilltop of bare brown clay where at least twice we and other cannibals burned Oma and Opa at the stake while whooping around them with spears and bows and arrows. They had their priorities right: the hydrangeas were planted before anything else so there were lots of places for ambushes. One day they were pretty much facing each other back to back over some issue they thought was important when my father grabbed a stick. “Let’s do it like this,” he said. Sketching in the dirt for barely me a minute, he drew the plan of the house and that’s how it was built.

First, a big square carpentry workshop was delivered to the site on the back of a truck. Next, parallel to it but 25 feet apart, the playroom from our last house inched up the steep drive on jacks and winches. For the first winter we had no glass in the windows and took it in turns to do the ironing to warm up. The bare earth between the two buildings became a sea of greasy mud. No electricity, just a hurricane lamp so I had to do my homework before it got dark. No hot water. The shower was the end of a continuously running pipe propped up on a crutch of poles in the middle of the duck pond. That winter not one of us got a cold an when we went out to dinner one night two or three of the girls fainted from the heat in the sitting room.

Slowly things got better. The space between the two buildings was roofed to make a bedroom, a bathroom and a large patio with a glass roof. Glass was installed in the windows. The big room become a huge live-in kitchen with a pot-belly stove. A very big room was built at the end, my parents’ bedroom, and positioned so they could count us going into the swimming pool every morning. Compulsory! When the lovely pine roof started to sag, I helped Opa build a four-poster bed to hold it up.

On paper it was magnificent, the culmination of a great vision to which all seven of us contributed. At night it was homely and charming, like a California film set. You expected Doris Day to come bouncing in wearing a red-and-white gingham shirt and singing Que Sera Sera. In the harsh light of day, however, this palace of bush carpentry was a disaster.

No room was finished (except mine, as it happens, because I built it myself). Spiders lurked behind every board. Every piece of timber was roughly nailed, no possibility of screws or glue. The patio was a workshop except when Opa brought half a steer home from the butcher and spent three days cutting and slicing it on the ping pong table. The garden was dotted with heaps of gravel and cement under tarpaulins, stacks of timber, heaps of concrete blocks and drainage pipes, rolls of netting, bits of boat, old engines and lots of tools.

Meals were based on lamb (actually hogget, a lamb older than one year), and we went through half a hogget in five days. Pudding was always home-made ice cream with chocolate sauce. Every meal-time was spent wild with laughter. We had round-robin quizzes, thinking of capitals or countries in alphabetical sequence. Teasing until you wanted to weep: I was ‘luncheon sausage’ because my ears went so pink when I blushed. Every night Oma would serve the ice cream and hold it out towards Opa at the end of the table. “Ice cream, Skunko?” she said.

“Just chuck it down,” he’d say, pretending to hold out his hands to catch it. And one day she did.

On rainy days the hills were soggy. You got not only big pellets of water in the rain itself but the gigantic drips plopping from the tip of every leaf. The stream running through the bush behind the house was quickly in spate then it was “John, water’s stopped!”

Whatever the time, day or night , I’d get into gumboots and shorts and wade up the foaming stream in the darkness. Spider-webs everywhere. Prickly brown wetas with six-inch legs look out from mossy hollows. Glow-worms gleam under ferny logs. Every time I put a hand on the galvanized pipe I get an electric shock, mild but strong enough to make me swear. After 15 minutes I get to the dam where the pipe inlet is lodged between two rocks and invariably blocked with fallen leaves. I clear it and fight my way down-stream again, slithering over the rocks but this time pulling the pipe apart at 50-yard intervals to ensure the water is flowing and, if not, to suck it through.

One Thursday morning I’m looking forward to a lie-in because it’s my day off. Opa has a day off too. Bursts of rain rattle on the tin roof and the tall punga trees outside the window sway soggily. Dogs and cats dotted around on various beds stretch and yawn. Then Oma comes up with her great idea – “Let’s go to Whatipu.”

“But we have to go to school…”

“Not today, I’ll write you all notes.”

Opa rolls his eyes to the ceiling and I see him thinking, “Oh no! We haven’t been to the beach all year and now we have to do it on the wettest day of the year in the middle of winter.” But of course he means oh yes. Soon the house is buzzing. Sandwiches made. Bottles of ginger beer packed. Two changes of clothes apiece are thrust into plastic bags. Opa lumbers out of the patio doors, wrinkling his brow against the rain as if to keep his blue eyes dry. “Ok, who’s coming?” he calls.

Knowing by hard experience he won’t wait, we pile into the Land Rover, Oma and me in front, four girls and two dogs in the back with picnic box, fishing rods and a sooty old kettle. Overnight, cobwebs have enveloped the rear-view mirror and windscreen wipers. We peel them away, the thin threads sticking to our wet fingers. Already the windows are steaming up. Opa coasts down the drive then jump- starts the engine in second gear and we’re off.

You should know more about this Land Rover. Imagine crossing a busy intersection in the middle of Auckland and in front of the line of traffic is a paint-chipped Land Rover with something startling lashed to its front grille with No.8 fencing wire – two sun-bleached ox skulls, completely with twisted horns and eye-sockets as black as barbecues. We found them on the high-tide mark beneath cliffs where we were camping.

Next thing that catches the eye is just inside the windscreen. Surely not a goldfish bowl? Yes indeed. Opa has a thing about injecting water with petrol to make it burn cleaner and leaner so the plastic container wired above the dash is half filled with slimy green water in which bob a pair of slimy (unnamed) plastic goldfish.

Behind the Land Rover is a four-wheeled trailer painted red and yellow with a fold-down ramp at the back and a plastic bucket containing a brush and hand-shovel hanging from a rail, For collecting poo. Ranged nose-to-tail down the length of the trailer, whisking their ears, are three or four donkeys. In the back of the Land Rover are four girls, usually dressed the same. Opa is at the wheel, wearing his full police uniform because after delivering the donkeys and their minders to various birthday parties around town he has to do a shift.

Just as the light turns green it happens, as it always does. Barkis begins to bray. The raucous chorus is joined by Scrooge and Nickleby. Peggotty flutters her eyelashes as if embarrassed by the whole thing. Pedestrians and drivers stare as if Martians have landed. You always knew when the Dysons were in town and the Police Superintendent got furious when Opa parked the rig outside his office window.

Bouncing hard-footed in the ruts, we turn away from the city taking ever-smaller roads wending through the bush-covered hills to the heads of the Manukau Harbour. The road is a river of mud. Heavy mist swirls through the trees. Rain beats down on the alloy roof. Whose mad idea was this?

The city of Auckland sprawls over a waist of land between two seas, Pacific on the east (8,000 miles to Cape Horn and South America) , and the Tasman and Indian Ocean on the west (1,000 miles to Sydney and a lot further to the Cape of Good Hope). In two places the distance between these two bodies of water is less than half a mile yet they could hardly be more different. The east coast is clean white sandy beaches, calm water and beautiful green islands. The west coast is iron-black sand, thundering surf, immense cliffs wreathed in gleaming surf-smoke, and driftwood comprising entire trees. The east is suburban, civilized, mild and picturesque. The west is remote, hard to reach, dramatic. And it’s called Whatipu – it’s our favourite place.

We chase each other through the lupins. Splash each other in the surf. Somehow Opa gets to sit down in the middle of a rushing creek. Collect strange knobby bits of driftwood. Fly like Norwegian ski-jumpers down nearly vertical slopes of soft black sand. Light a smoky bonfire in a cave. Climb down swell-torn rock faces to pick mussels as big as spectacle cases. With every pocket filled, the girls remove their jeans, knot the bottoms and we fill them too. Drive home wet and tired with mussels piled high in the middle of the spare wheel attached to the bonnet and the wet dogs farting under our black-sandy feet. “Hello ducks!”

Mussel fritters for dinner. Ice cream and choc sauce for pudding again. Surprise.

Everybody has their dream. Lucky are they who realise it, even if it doesn’t come out in quite the way they envisaged. As happened to my parents, Jim and Jacky.

We lived in a small wooden house with cream-painted weatherboard cladding, a red tin roof and dark panelling inside with tall door handles. There were three small rooms plus an enclosed sun porch in front, an open porch at the back, and a dunny down a little path down the back surrounded by tall flax bushes and covered in banana passion fruit vine. Not much room to bring up a boy who was oldest by three years, and four little girls born in the space of five years. Their dream was to build a long, low ranch house in American style with a stone fireplace, sun deck, terraces, a modern kitchen with a refrigerator, and a room for each one of their children. Not a big dream, perhaps, but epic in proportion given the fact that they had no money. Even so, most nights after we kids were in bed they sat out in the porch under the light, insects whirling around their heads, and planned the details of their dream house on sheets of squared paper. I never heard them argue more bitterly, not cattily but with weary exasperation. Should the linen cupboard go on this side of the hot water cylinder or that side? Bet your life, each had a different idea. “It’s got to go on the right because that’s nearest the door,” Jim would say.

“No, on the left because that’s where I’ll be ironing and I can just put it straight in,” Jacky argued.

“Think, woman! Why would you do the ironing in the bathroom?”

“Because that’s where I always do it.”

“But this is a big new house, you don’t have to do the ironing in the bathroom.”

“So where will I do it?”

“Um…”

When impasse was reached, the squared paper was put away for a few months and the focused on playing canasta or chess.

Auckland like interlaced fingers, one side the Pacific – blue, sandy, clear – the other side the Tasman, murky water, black sand, powerful surf.In two places, both called portage Road because they were old canoe routes for Maoris travelling from one harbour to the other, the two oceans are barely half a mile apart. It was in the dark bush-clad hills on the west side, overlooking the muddy Manukau Harbour and close to the wild beaches were immense surf thundered on long reaches of black sand, too hot to walk upon barefooted in summer, flax thrashing its long glinting leaves in the breeze. The hills were covered in deep bush protected to catch drinking water in dams. Around the edge of the bush were small rural communities. Only half an hour out of town but it seemed a long distance at the time. Here, at the head of a grassy valley, was a small-holding that my parents bought when I was seven. My father extended a road through the property and sold off building lots. At the end of a side-road overlooking the valley was 14 acres on the edge of the protected bush that he kept for ourselves.

A bulldozer came in and scooped the top off a little hill, creating a flat place on which to build a house, and scraped out a drive. Bracken, fern and springy kikuyu grass soon covered the bare earth. For years, my parents had sat under the light on the porch every evening, insects thrumming around the light, hotly discussing the details of their dream house. One day when I was about ten my pals and I were camping on the building site. Pup tents were pitched in a half circle around a fire and a totem pole. We carried water up from the creek. We plaited Zulu-like shields out of palm leaves, built a Robinson Crusoe cabin with a thatched roof up in the trees, built a dam for swimming. When my parents strolled up for a look-see they were captured, bound to the stake and the ceremonial slaughter was about to begin when Jim held up a commanding hand, grabbed a stick and drew a plan in the dirt. “Jacky,” he said, “let’s do our house like this…”

End of argument. That plan took shape as we followed it exactly. Eloquently simple, it was basically two oblongs set forty feet apart. “We’ll build a kitchen in this one and live in it,” Jim said, stabbing one square with the stick. “And we’ll sleep in this one while building other rooms in the gap and later on as we can afford it we’ll add to each end. We had no money and we’d have to do it all ourselves, but that didn’t faze a New Zealander.

First a dilapidated carpentry shed being demolished somewhere in town, was brought up in pieces and re-erected. Next, a bunkhouse Jim had built to extend our old house down the hill was brought up on the back of a truck and set down on new foundations. A sink was put in the corner of the shed but there was no water. That came by gravity feed from the creek in the bush and the outflow was the end of a pipe propped up on sticks in the duck pond. It was my job to keep the buckets under the sink filled up. The pipe was also our shower. The duck pond was calf deep in squishy orange mud dotted with rushes. At first, you had to wade naked into the deep end to wash the mud off your legs before clambering up the bank. Later, we built a rough wooden platform to stand on, and a duck-walk across the mud. The lavatory was a performance. In the bush below the house Jim dug a neat hole with a post-hole borer. There was great excitement when the warder in charge of explosives at the city prison came with a stick of dynamite. He was a small, grizzled man with sticking-up grey hair. After a bottle of beer he set the charge, little fuse and retired to a safe distance. There was a dull Thunk and a little eruption of clay. The explosion had neatly excavated a cavern at the bottom of the hole. “I hope it doesn’t collapse,” Jacky said thinly.

“Me too,” said Dad.

A sewer pipe was up-ended over the hole and while Jim built a rough seat with a hole in it I cut poles out of the bush, built a three-sided shelter, and thatched it with palm leaves. By night we lit our way down the slippery path to the ‘dunny’ , or long-drop privy, with a hurricane lantern with brought in squadrons of mosquitoes that hungrily attacked bared nether regions. The thatch filled with spiders and a big ugly brute like a sleepy praying mantis or grasshopper six or eight inches long that was inclined to crawl up the back of your neck and give you the heebie jeebies. It was about two years before drains were dug, a septic tank was built, and the first ceremonial flush brought tears to Jacky’s eyes.

It also took a long while to be wired up. I had to do my homework before dark. The bunkhouse had no windows at all and the carpenter’s shed had the wrong windows in all the wrong places, so Jim attacked with a circular saw and cut out big squares, but there was no money to buy window frames or glass so he nailed up blankets and tarpaulins. Through the first winter we ran round and round the small kerosene heater and were punished with the ‘magic wand’ if caught sitting on it. There were fights to have a turn at doing the ironing to warm up.

When a fight came to blows my parents would announce “Bush week!” and watch events for a short while, ensuring that any blows were traded in a fair and proper manner. When it had gone on long enough, seldom more than ten seconds, it was “Bush week’s over!” and the fighting had to stop instantly. Arguments between kids were easily settled. Beside the house was a steep hill covered with grass and clumps of bracken. When a skirmish broke out Jacky would point to the offenders – “You and you, up the hill and if you don’t come back with lovely smiles on your faces you can go up again.” When racing to put things together in time for the school bus this was terminally inconvenient, for if we missed the bus we had to walk three or four miles.

Bit by bit the house took shape around us and big advances like a real shower and bedside lights were greeted with great excitement and immense satisfaction. Frames went into the windows, then glass. An old fridge was installed so we didn’t have to keep meat, butter and milk in a ventilated box hanging from a tree outside the back door. The orange clay between the two buildings that became such a quagmire in winter we had to reach our beds in gumboots became a couple of children’s bedrooms, a bathroom and a Perspex-roofed patio with a ping pong table that I made myself for Jim’s birthday. My own bed was in the bathroom where the bath would go – eventually – and for several years I had hot and cold taps above my pillow. Years later I heard of two young woman arguing over the most important wedding presents to put on their lists so they asked their grandmother which single thing had made the biggest difference to her life – toaster? dishwasher? fridge? kettle? Unhesitatingly she told them it was the inside tap and with the benefit of my own experience she was right.

My father ruled that I had to pay one quarter of anything I earned to Jacky, and work half my free time for him. Through school holidays and later through days off from work and at weekends, I worked – as he did – on the house. I painted, built fences and creosoted them, built a garage, carried and stacked timber, dug ditches, gradually carpeted the bare dirt in grass sod cut out of the pasture and transported by wheelbarrow then watered and mowed. We had four goats munching down the bracken so grass could grow and every evening I had to move the stakes to which they were tethered, not always easy. Giddy Godiva was mad. The moment you touched her chain she ran round and round very fast. If you weren’t nippy about it the chain would behind you to the post. Jacky was trapped once and had to call for help.

A big new bedroom was built on the end for my parents which freed up space for me to build my own room just how I wanted. I built a ship’s cabin with a raised bunk that had drawers under it and a board to stop you falling out in heavy seas. Working at my long desk I could look through the big window straight into the bush. After a while the ceiling of my parents’ room began to sag because not enough beams had been put in to support the roof. He scratched his head over it for a long time and one day lit on a solution. “Jacky, how do you feel about a four-poster bed?” he asked.

So he built her a grand four-poster bed in the middle of the room and it held the ceiling up.

It was a good five years before this encampment with carpentry tools was transformed into an establishment resembling a habitable house. And then it was magical. At the end of the road you drove between yellow and orange wagon wheels and a signboard saying ‘Cartwheels.’ You came up the steep drive lined with monster blue and pink hydrangeas, emerging into a small park between hummocky outcrops just steep enough for kids to roll down. It was dotted with handsome kahikatea and totara trees, grazed by a handful of sheep. The car was greeted by a loud chorus of Peking ducks that shared the muddy pond with geese. The house was set amid terraces and lawns with a barbecue fireplace. There was a vegetable garden geraniums in pots. The big shed had been transformed into a ranch-style living room. An iron pot-bellied stove stood on a hearth made with stones we collected from the beach. The kitchen occupied one quarter of the space and was fenced in, so to speak, by a chest-high bar made with a gigantic beam of timber scrounged from a water reservoir that was demolished. The ceiling was Chinese red, the walls slatey blue and Jacky saved for months to buy a white Indian carpet.

Menagerie outside. Kingfishers in a box. Pigeons living over the garage. Sheep and goats. Ducks and geese. Dogs and cats. Freezer full of beef and lamb. Native birds: tuis and fantails, moreporks calling at night. Bull terrier. Alsatian useless: prisoner escape, stone on roof.

Then came the donkeys. Weekend work. Parked at police station in red and yellow trailer.

My father was big on construction and landscaping but small joinery. Nothing was finished: gingham curtains on wires, for instance, did duty as cupboard doors. The rooms were not lined but the noggins – horizontal timbers between the uprights – were great for putting things. At dinner one day around the long refectory table made from a mahogany plank being thrown away by a ship, Jacky made it known that it would be really lovely if some of the rooms were lined and painted – easier to keep clean and not so many spiders.

“Well this is the situation,” Jim said, scoffing his ration of home-made ice cream and chocolate sauce that we had for desert every single night. “We’ve got just enough money put away to buy the hardboard and paint and finish off every bedroom. Would you like that?”

Jacky’s eyes glowed with happiness. My sisters nodded solemnly; they didn’t much care because they’d never known anything else but noggins for dressing tables and spiders for company.

“On the other hand,” my father went on. “We could put that money towards buying sand and cement and build a swimming pool…”

No contest. We built it like a dam in the gully above the duck pond and below the vegetable garden. Neighbours came to help build the shuttering and mix the concrete. Each of the family put a handprint in the wet cement and later we painted them in.

The down-side was a new rule that morning swims were compulsory through spring, summer and autumn. By cursed bad luck the new four-poster bed was strategically positioned so my father, without lifting his head from the pillow, could count his children going into the water and count them coming out. The up-side was none of us ever got sick.

My father, Jim, was born in Java and at ten years old came to New Zealand with his mother after his parents split up. He was a tall, broad-shouldered Dutchman with a slight accent and blue eyes that could quell a riot with one glare. One day the whole family was packed into our VW Beetle on a narrow street in town when the way was blocked by two immense tough-looking Polynesians who had stopped their motorbikes in the middle of the road and were having a chat. One of them tipped his head as if to say, “Go around.” My father switched off, got out, did his heavy policeman’s walk up to them, his blue eyes blazing. Immediately they kick-started their engines and left, one passing us with an apologetic wave. He could do the same with us kids. He believed firmly in smacking but because we knew he would, seldom had to. He was fierce but never less than fair, and had a mischievous sense of humour. Hated to talk about dreams that could not be realised, or stood little chance of it.

My mother had lost her own mother from cancer at the age of 11, and at just the same moment her father lost his farm to the bank. She acted as mother to her younger sister and brother. Her grandfather was a famous sailing-ship captain. The family lived modestly in a small suburban house, but during school holidays went off into the bush where her father, a consummate axe-man and pioneer, took contracts to fell and trim giant kauri trees that would be dragged out of the bush by teams of oxen. She was strong-minded, positive, capable and wonderfully feminine. Romantic, dreamer, filled my head with fancy ideas. d

Neither had great schooling, my father’s veterinary studies being interrupted by the war. My earliest certain memory is his return from England a day earlier than ever. He knocked on the door of the cluttered and untidy flat owned by his mother, where we were staying. I had just finished tea and had no pants on. A tall blue figure with shiny brass buttons stood at the door. My mother threw both arms around him and both her feet came off the ground.

Our life was filled with giggles and doings and work and happiness but there was never talk of religion, music or ideas or history. There was no television but we listened a lot to the radio and always had the two daily newspapers. But the camping holidays were sublime. The first time we threw sleeping bags and a big green tarpaulin into the back of our Austin van with a banana box of supplies, a frying pan and the dog. For three weeks we explored the Rotorua lakes, camping in a different spot every night, usually sleeping under the stars without the tarpaulin. From the moment the van stopped to the kettle coming to the boil with the beds made of bracken, sleeping bags unrolled, and everything set up for the night, took about eight minutes.

By next summer we’d acquired so much in the way of tents, stretcher beds for my parents and lilos for us, fishing rods, snorkelling gear, spear guns and other kit that we needed a trailer to carry it. The Coromandel Peninsula, fifty miles long and four or five wide, was a range of high and wild bush-clad hills, often capped with cloud, that stood out like some exotic island on the Auckland’s horizon. It was almost completely deserted. We followed a one-track dirt road that twisted and turned from back to bay, each one formed by a small creek twisting out of the hills and overhung with gnarled pohutukawa trees that flowered a deep red at Christmas. The water was warm and clear, the rocks speckled with tasty oysters, the reefs thick with kelp and busy with fish.

One day we followed a dirt track for 20 miles across the peninsula to a wild and remote rocky bay called Port Kennedy. There were no houses, the farm was deserted, and the grass sward along the creek was perfect for camping.

With cries of joy we pitched our tents in a circle around the fire. Joanna, then about five, was obsessed with fishing. She climbed down the steep grassy bank into the creek with a sugar bowl, bent on catching an eel. When she gave a squeal and shouted, “Mummy, mummy, I’ve got one, bring a bigger bowl!” none of us paid any attention. An eel in a sugar bowl, come on!

My father, sipping his mug of tea, strolled over to check what she was doing and was just in time to see a thick and slippery black tail slither between her legs. He dropped his mug, jumped down the bank and jerked her out by her arms. “Good God!” he said.

So we set about catching the eel. My father took a huge steel hook out of his box and tied it to the end of thick green twine. He cut a cube of dog meat with his sheath knife, threaded it on to the hook, then bound it with nylon filament line. I knew what he was doing because I’d seen him catch eels with an army chum when I was about five. The eels took a hefty bite on the meat and while they couldn’t let go you ran as fast as possible, dragging them out of the water and up the bank. If they got off too soon they’d leap and slither frantically back to the water so it was important to put in some distance. Next day I went back to the creek with my friend Bobby and saw all the dead eels lying on the grass, all of them beheaded. I picked up one of the heads and put it on the flat of my hand and studied it closely. It opened its mouth.

I shrieked and flung it away. Ever since, if I was going to have a nightmare it was invariably about eels.

Now my father cautiously lowered the bait into the creek. In a few moments a huge grey heard appeared, sniffed, opened its big mouth and snatched. My father took off accompanied by screaming kids. The monster eel got off and fell back in the water.

The same thing happened several times, but at last the eel got firmly hooked.

Jacky was stooped over the fire, boiling potatoes and frying fish for dinner, when she heard more screams. This time they were louder and sustained. Even the Alsatian dog, Marshall, was barking excitedly. She glanced up and dropped the frying pan.

Her husband was sprinting across the grass, flat out, closely followed by her son. After them, in order of size, came her four little girls in bathing suits. And after them, leaping high through the grass, its black back glistening and its silver belly shining, was the biggest eel she’d ever imagined.

“Jim, Jim!” she shouted in alarm, wondering why he hadn’t turned around to protect the children from the man-eating eel snapping at their heels.

What she couldn’t see was the fishing line.

The eel was three-foot-six long and as fat as gumboot. It expired in the middle of the field then we hung it by its tail from a tree near the cove and every day hacked a bit off to use as bait for fishing. I crawled into my tent that night but didn’t sleep for ages, thinking about the huge eels brothers and sisters slithering through the wet grass and coming to get me.

It was not until the last couple of days that we crested the hill at the very tip of the peninsula and looked down at a mile-long crescent of white sand, a wide clean creek rippling between hot boulders, an old jetty, green fields with patches of bush. It was called Port Jackson and it became our second home. Every summer thereafter we pitched our camp in the same spot beside the stream. Our supplies comprised little more than cabin bread in a big tin, cartons of cornflakes, honey, tinned milk, tea and potatoes.

After cornflakes and toast for breakfast we shouldered the fishing lines and snorkelling gear and trekked to the rocky point at one end of the beach or the other. I half an hour my father would spear three or four fish big enough to feed us, thread them on a piece of flax, and we’d boil a billy for tea with cabin bread and honey. In the evenings we had the fish with potatoes, putting our tin plates under a rock in the stream and little eels would come in during the night and clean them up. In the moonlight we played silly games on the sand, sometimes lighting a huge fire of driftwood that sent sparks shooting up to the stars. It seldom rained and the only people we ever saw were the local farmer and his family.

One day a family of strangers drove down the hill and started to erect their camp right beside us. My father was fuming: the beach was a mile long so why did they have to come beside us. Then little sister Joanna wandered over, said something, and in a few minutes the strangers had packed up and left. “What on earth did you tell them?” my father asked.

“I just said there was a wasp nest there,” she said.