My father sits on the porch steps in the spring sunshine and pulls his boots on. He takes his shabby canvas tennis hat, brim lined with top-stitched green cotton, and with a practised hand, adjusts it to shade his eyes in the bright Marlborough Sounds light and stay on his head in the inevitable wind at the top of the hill.
He collects his long aluminium shepherd's crook and a loose bundle of twine which goes into the pocket of his khaki shorts along with a stub of blue raddle and a box of matches.
His pipe firmly clenched between his teeth, he pats his shirt pocket, checking the soft leather tobacco pouch is safely stowed.
My brother David and I are going lambing with Dad on this fine August school holiday morning. I am 10 and David is 8 and we each have a new box of Beehive matches in our pockets for lighting the stumpy wiggy-wig bushes that dot the hillside above Hallam Cove, the dense white smoke showing our father exactly where we are as we make our way along the narrow sheep tracks and down the stony gullies to meet him and the Land Rover on the road below.
★★★ On Sunday mornings, once a month, my father collects six pairs of brown leather shoes: his and my mother's brogues, strap shoes for me and lace-ups for three of my younger brothers.
While our mother harries us into our "good" clothes, Dad disappears to the workshop and gets to work with the brown nugget. The shoes emerge, polished to the military shine he learned in North Africa and Italy between 1942 and 1945.
Dressed up in tie and sports coat, Dad herds us into the Land Rover, lights his pipe and and starts the engine. We wait until Mum hurries from the house, lipstick still in hand, baby Andrew on her hip, hauling a bag stuffed full of clean nappies, a baby bottle and vegemite sandwiches for my perpetually hungry brothers.
We're going to church at the French Pass Memorial Hall where we'll wriggle on wooden benches, try to sing hymns accompanied by Mrs Peggy Young on the slightly out of tune piano and listen to a mostly incomprehensible sermon from the Anglican minister from Havelock.
During communion, we'll be released to run outside and play on the mounds of kikuyu grass that line the shore, "but no going on the wharf!"
★★★ My father peers into the dense fog cloaking the French Pass road above Pelorus Sound's Hallam Cove. He's fetched me from boarding school for the 1968 May holidays and we're driving home in the dark.
The 1954 Chevrolet slowly crawls along, fog lights barely making a dent in the thick whiteness. We bump across the cattle stop that marks the end of the bush reserve and the start of our farm.
Dad pulls over. "Let's see if it will clear." He pushes a few large pinches of tobacco firmly into the charred bowl of his pipe and lights it. A few puffs later, the familiar, reassuring smell of pipe smoke drifts across.
"Turn the radio on; let's see if we can get Australia." And we can, somehow, crackling in from across the Tasman to the top of that narrow finger of land pointing towards Mt Taranaki. Dad finishes his pipe.
"Your mother will be worried, we'd better get going," he says. He finds a torch in the boot and I walk just forward of the right-hand bumper and the car slowly follows me and my torch-light until we are safely below the fog. Fifteen minutes later, we're home.
★★★ My father takes me and my brother, David, to the Capistrano, one of Nelson's first restaurants. It's 1969 and we're on our way back to boarding school, David to Fell House as a form one prep student, me to Clarice Johnston House for my second year.
We're nervous and unhappy about the prospect of a long winter term in Nelson coping with distant and demanding teachers and trying to negotiate the foreign country that is a big single-sex secondary school.
The Capistrano is a treat before the school doors clang shut behind us. There are white table cloths and dark red velvet on the walls, windows and chairs. There are sparkling glasses and silverware and a man wearing a white shirt and bowtie asking us for our order.
Dad orders a steak and a beer, I have chicken and lemonade with ice and a straw, but David kicks the mahogany table leg, pulling the white damask askew, and won't have anything except bacon and eggs, not on the menu, and a glass of water. Dad sighs.
★★★ My father devoted a lot of time and care to getting the six of us (one more brother joined us in 1972) launched into independence. In the universal way of children, we didn't appreciate how much he and my mother willingly sacrificed for our sakes.
He wasn't the "perfect" parent; which of us as parents is?
But he was always there and, even in his darker times, the most interested, proud and generous of fathers.
I write this on Father's Day, which marks two years since his death.
Thank you, Dad.
- © Fairfax NZ News
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