It is as unlike our square state bungalow as is possible toimagine and still be a house. It is painted moss green, has leaded windows,many bedrooms, a real dining room, a pantry, and what Zelda's mother callsa scullery. To them, New Zealandis the wilds, the Antipodes, a collection of hard-drinking grownups andbarefoot children and natives running wild through the gorse and toi-toi.Īfter the first few weeks, we play exclusively at Zelda's house, whichcomes straight out of all those English storybooks I had been raised on,tall and spooky looking. Zelda herself is so nervous aboutthe other children that she won't even walk home alone. It has long since driven me outinto the creeks and blackberries, the estuary and the gravel pit, of thesurrounding countryside.īut I can't show Zelda my special places in the neighbourhood becausethe first time she comes home with me, Zelda's mother calls mine, and begsher to see that we stay in the yard. Our yard, a neatly mowedsquare of lawn with four symmetrically placed fruit trees, has no bowers,no vines, none of the lushness of hers. She standsstiffly with her hands clasped in front of her stomach, and says nothing.To her, the neat wooden box we live in allows no privacy, no escape fromconvention, no room for fantasy and adventure. She's quiet and politeto my mother, but doesn't seem to know where to put herself. I have my games and fantasies, just as Zeldadoes, but hers are so much more exotic than mine because she comes fromBritain, a small country but one with great power and a widespread empire.She has also travelled the world, whereas I know only New Zealand, a countryso tiny and unimportant that it barely shows up at the bottom of the globein the school library.Ī few times, Zelda comes to my house to play. I'm something of a loner too, different from the other kids becauseI live alone with my mother and one, much older brother no father, whichwas unusual in those days. A couple of neighbour kids who venture over can 't handleit, though, and pretty soon they stop showing up, so it's just Zelda andme. If dinner is ready, but Zelda isn't, her father blusters andher mother pleads, but Zelda just says, "No Mummy, I shan't come now, stopbeing such a bother." I'm unnerved by all this, but after one or two visits,I get used to it. If she's silent most of the time in class, at home she's a banshee,racing through the house and yard, waving her mother's underwear aroundher head and screaming "Brassiére!" Jeeze, don't the neighbourscomplain? There's something about her wildness, her imagination, and thefact that she's clearly beyond her parents control that both repels andexcites me. Old Gibsy says no, of course, butfrom then on, Zelda and I are inseparable. When we go inside I ask if Ican move my seat to sit next to her. "I say,well done," she says in her pluty accent. I look past Zelda and tell him to bloody piss off, catching the shockon her face as she hears my language. "Hanging around the Pongo, Challinor?" asks Phillip Sullivan. The crustsare cut off, and I bite into one, amazed to find that it's got cucumberin it and not much else. Finally she takes the sandwichand holds her packet of sandwiches out to me to choose one. Her eyes slide from side toside, as she tries to figure out what to do. I throw myself down next to her in the lunch bay outside the classroom,and offer her a cheese and Marmite sandwich. She lives up on top of the hill in a big house rumouredto have been owned by John Court (or was it George Court?). Here's Zelda, a real live piece of England right in my own backyard - or nearly. Afew are set in America, a distant, irrelevant place, but most are set inEngland. I'm only beginning to come to terms with the stunning discovery thatthe books I've been reading for years are not all set in New Zealand. But then she loosens up, and I become fascinated bythe way she calls jumpers woollies, and without really meaning to she startstalking about all the places she's been - Curaçao and the PanamaCanal - and I'm hopelessly sucked in. Gibbs starts talking about the weather in Britain,and asks her if it is colder than Auckland, and her shoulders immediatelygo stiff in fright. I watch her, but for the next month, she stays on her guard.Then in geography, Mr. "Sounds like the bloody Queen," Danny Delaney says. When she speaks, I understand why she's a Pom, a Pongo, and an upper-class one at that. Her fingers vibrate too, and fear clouds her gray eyes. She has skin so white and fine I imagine I can see beneath it the swirling of her venous blood, the vibration of tiny nerves. It's 1956, and I'm twelve, when Zelda shows up in my class at Tamaki Intermediate.
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