When I think about growing up in New Zealand I think about cold. Not the kind of cold where there is snow on the ground and ice on the windows, not the kind of cold where you need to dress for the climate and all the houses have central heat. The cold I remember is the kind of cold where you don't want to get out of bed in the morning. Where since it's never that cold or that hot the houses have no central heat, or air.
It's the kind of cold where in the morning there is sometimes frost on the ground, but not usually. In the morning I would fall out of bed from beneath the feather comforters and away from my electric blanket then crawl muscles still and aching to the one bar electric heater. This I would sit as close to as I could without setting fire to any part of my pajamas. Slowly the heat would burn a toe while my whole foot still stayed cold, and I would dress.
My fingers would always ache from the cold while I pulled on my underwear and my uniform socks. Grey woolen socks that reached almost to the knee. These were my favorite part of the uniform, for all the cool kids wearing your socks pulled up was a sign of conformity, of nerd-ness of being a dork. For me they were simply the only thing that kept my legs from freezing, I would sooner be labeled a dork than be cold. My uniform tunic was below my knee in Form 3, when I was thirteen on the first day of High School but by Form 5 it was above my knee, not indecently short like the poor or skanky girls, just short enough that my fat little knees could shake with cold beneath it. Then on top the sweater, the regulation sweatshirt, dark blue and thin of acrylic and polyester. I wouldn't wear this tied around my waste or drape it artistically across my shoulders I was never warm enough for that.
The hard leather shoes, still too big after two years of growing into them were strapped on last, pulling my almost warm feet away from the heater in order to slide them into the clumpy black shoes.
It was thus attired that I would face the world. Later I would convince my parents to buy me thermal underwear and the top of this I would wear beneath the uniform tunic, far too ugly an outfit to be called a dress it was supposed to make us all the same. As if uniforms create uniformity. The boys would wear grey shorts and shirts and we girls had tunics. On the first day of school you already knew who was cool and who wasn't. The cool girls had their uniforms tailored to show off their legs and their waists and whatever breasts they could boast of. The girls like me had new uniforms 3 sizes too big bought by mothers who wanted to make sure we had room to grow, large tents of pale blue tartan, with no visible body geographical features, and poor kids had their sister's uniform, passed down already one too many times, material washed thin and even paler in a size either much smaller or much larger than they were. Yes true uniformity had been created.
It was thus clad that I would leave the house and walk to school. This was not really true, or often true because I could and would convince my parents to drive me to school as they had since I was 5, either because I was too late to get there on time unless they drove me, or because it was raining, or threatening to rain.
It rains a lot in Auckland. "Four seasons in one day, sun shines on the black clouds hanging over the Domain." I know exactly where the songwriter was standing when he wrote this. If it's not raining, wait. In one day it will be hot and sunny, overcast and gloomy, pouring with rain, showering rain while you are simultaneously getting a sunburn. Most days I would walk home from school. Most days I would arrive home wet. Now I should have carried a raincoat or an umbrella, this would have been sensible but I learned when I was young that these devices require a certain type of co-ordination I do not possess. I find nothing more irritating than encasing myself in rubber only to have water pour down my neck. So I tried to practice a type of zen rationalism. The water will not hurt you, just don't fight it. And thus I would walk back in rain and shine from school getting wet but trying not to be angry, getting cold but walking faster to be warm, holding my hands deep in my pockets or arms folded around back hunched sheltering beneath the nylon of my schoolbag head down into the wind trying to warm up trying to stay dry enough that the water did not pour in streams down the back of my neck but only fell in gentle soaking drops evenly distributed, trying to avoid the puddles and the squelching damp of wet feet, trying to get home as quickly as I could to the one orange bar of heat in the living room.
When I was about 8 I set fire to my bedroom. Not intentionally, I just tipped over the little heater and burned a hole in the carpet. A nice square hole for which my parents claimed insurance and got enough money to replace our entire carpet and instead they kept the money and patched the hole. When I was 9 I set fire to the living room. Again not intentionally I'm not even sure if it was me, the dog or one of the other kids who actually did it. All I really remember was that the heater in the living room was on (on high of course) and the flames shooting up the drape which had ended up in front of it. My mom put it out before the house went up. The remarkable thing is that despite small burns on my fingers and toes I never caught fire to myself. This was before the days of flame resistant pajamas and mine probably would have gone up like a torch except that for some reason it didn't happen.
I remember my classrooms as a child not by how pretty they were or where they were located but rather by how cold they were. Standard 2, Grade 2 in the US I think, was spent in Mrs Tombes class. She was a lovely lady but we were in a prefab classroom. A small box made out of gypsum board with a tin roof, the kind of portable classroom that gets added to a school because the school is growing and then is never replaced with a real building and is used forever because the school doesn't shrink again. Four or five long one bar heaters had been put in the room to heat it. For safety they were obviously attached to the ceiling. Even at 7 I knew that was a bad idea, heat rises, you don't need to be a engineer with a degree in physics to know this you just have to try to get warm in a classroom without insulation and with the heating on the ceiling.
The year I started High School the headmaster decided to deal with the budget cuts by cutting back on the heating. He would only run the furnaces in the afternoon. All morning I would sit in the concrete block rooms on my plastic and metal chairs sitting on my hands. Recess would be spent with my friends who were as cold as I in whatever piece of sun we could find warming ourselves in it's rays and at lunch I would rush to the library. There the warm water would now be slowly circulating the radiators. I would sit on the radiators as they heated up, all lunchtime if I could. My brother would tease me that I was such a nerd and I spent all lunchtime in the library, he did not feel it the way I did, he could not understand the damp cold that ached through my bones and filled me with a gentle despair. He was too busy, playing soccer, or cricket, or rugby or tennis, he was too busy being popular while I and my small circle of good friends would take our blue hands into the library daily and hold them to the radiators until we felt human.
PE class, physical education, was just more torture. Stripping down in an ice cold locker room to shorts and a t-shirt then being sent outside to run, play hockey or whatever. Sure the exercise would eventually warm you but not before you sat on the cold damp grass being told what to do, running was always a joke for me. I would fall over with cramps and breathing problems long before I ever reached the finish line. I thought that everyone hurt when they breathed, when they ran, I thought it was just that I wasn't fit and if I could just run long enough and get fit I wouldn't be falling on the ground gasping for air, sucking shallow breaths of pain. I was 26 when I had my first full blown asthma attack, I called my parents and I said "I had an asthma attack last night" to which my dad responded that "I always thought you were asthmatic." My cousin was an asthmatic, her parents drove to to the hospital often. My own mother would say "well you know that's what you get from coddling a child, making a sickie". I wasn't coddled, I was never diagnosed an asthmatic and when I never got fit enough to run, when I never did any athletic activity, when I couldn't swim a lap in the pool but my younger brother and sister could it was because I was a bookworm.
Of course the worst PE classes were those where they tried to teach us to swim. Swimming in cold water is not my idea of fun to this day. Jumping into a swimming pool in November in New Zealand is my idea of cruel and unusual punishment. Summer in New Zealand starts in December, late late December and the warmest days of the year are always in February right after we went back to school. Swimming lessons were always in November so we could learn to swim before we went to the beach with our families for Christmas. If it wasn't sad and humiliating enough to get my fat (I can't run or do any exercise so I'm a bookworm) thighs into a swimsuit the only thing sadder was trying to make me swim.
Most of my lessons were spent on the side of the pool wrapped in a towel shivering waiting for the kids who could swim to do laps. I was put in the "can't swim" group in high school because after years of throwing my asthmatic ass into ice cold water I had never learned to swim. I had learned to drown, I had learned how to relax while I was rescued and I had learned how to panic in any water that was deeper than my head.
The ironic thing was that we had our own swimming pool. My brother and sister could swim like fish but the only stroke I could do was backstroke because any time I put my face into the water my airways would close up and I would panic and gasp down water while trying to get air. We also had a hot tub. My father had made both. The hot tub was a wooden culvert which he had turned on it's side and poured cement into the bottom of, he'd built the seats, attached a pump and a heater. The pool was a large Para pool of the type that was popular in the seventies with a metal frame and a plastic liner. Ours was 28 feet long, 10 feet wide and 4 feet deep. This meant we had the coolest pool in the neighbourhood, in fact one of the only pools in the neighbourhood. It was however too cool to enjoy most of the year. We used it as a plunge pool to cool off from the hot tub and we used it as a dare in the winter. Swims in the winter were not measured in hours but in steps. How many steps could you do before you had to get out. The trick was to stay in the water long enough to get numb, long enough that the pain would end, long enough that you couldn't feel your feet touching the ground. But the pain would continue, each step splashing water onto your not quite numb torso. I usually won this game, not because I dealt with the cold better than my brother and sister but because I couldn't bear to lose. And when I got out I would stand in front of the full length mirror in the hallway, the only full length mirror in the house, one given to my parents as a wedding present and I would watch my body in amazement as feeling returned to my toes. My feet were blue, my teeth were chattering, and it was not just an expression, my knees did knock, hard and fast with a rhythmic thumping that both surprised and fascinated me.
In an effort for us to use the pool more often and make his pool maintenance worthwhile my father built a plastic greenhouse over the pool. Constructed of plastic sheeting and bent PVC pipes I did not at the time realize the ingenuity and brilliance of his design, I only thought it looked silly and that we still needed to get a heater for the pool because it still wasn't warm enough for me.
Of course most of our swimming was done at the beach, because like all Kiwis this is where every holiday was spent. Although the ocean was cold this was where everyone was and so I followed, crying as the water hit my knees, then groin, then chest, then dive under through a wave before your nerve failed you. Since I couldn't really swim I became adept at understanding waves, understanding my own limits and staying within them. I only had to be rescued 2 or 3 times by my brother, always because I had fallen into the temptation of trying to follow him out to where he was. We always went to surf beaches because my parents love body surfing and all of our family had beach houses at surf beaches.
The first house I ever lived in in New Zealand was the family beach bach (as all beach houses are called). It was a white clapboard house built by my great grandfather when my grandmother was still in her 20s. Set on a huge lot the house had a large pohutakawa tree in the back yard (and even as an adult this tree is still enormous). I climbed that tree when I was four. I don't know how high I went, in my mind it was miles up, up past the big branches, up to where the little twigs start. And somewhere up there past the big branches I stepped on a rotten branch and down I went. Down miles, flying backward through the air watching the tree fall away from me until all was black. By the time I regained consciousness my mother and brother were over me, I didn't know how they had got there so quickly, I had broken nothing and I was fine, so no need to take me to a doctor or anything. My mother was not a fan of taking us to doctors, my father would rush us to one for antibiotics at any opportunity.
The family bach was three bedrooms on the east side, a living room/kitchen with a fire on the west side, a small sunroom in the front of the house, south facing and in front of the living room (the sunroom was the only room that ever, ever got warm), the bathroom was behind the laundry room and it contained the old iron bathtub stained red with the vile dirt colored water that came from the town and a large laundry room at the rear of the house where the antique ringer washer and refrigerator were housed. Then attached right to the back the room that had been added last, the ultimate after thought, the toilet. Behind that was the back yard, the porch, the large iron tank to collect rain water to drink and in the yard a hand water pump and the tree.
When I was little water still came out of the pump with only a few cranks, but no-one used it, why should they when we had both town and rain water. When I was about 10 the well stopped pumping water and I was sad at it's loss, an era had ended.
The old house was painted in white paint back then, a lead based paint that washed off slowly over time and I would run my hands along it turning them white. The bach except for the old log fire had no heating. It was only built to be lived in for the summer. We rented it from the family over the winter, there was no money. No money to buy anything unnecessary. My mother had to ask her mother for money to buy a heater, she was refused. Most of that winter I don't think we had heat. I would play outside when I could, it was warmer outside than in.
For my birthday that year I got a beautiful doll sent to me from my godmother in America. It had a bath, you could wash it, it ate and drank, peed and pooped. At least while you feed it the special food. When that ran out I feed it whatever I had and it did not work anymore. Then I feed it toothpicks stuffing them down in an attempt to clean out the wrong food. After that I washed her in the wrong soap and her hair was ruined forever, so I cut it to fix it and she was never the same again. The dolly still had beautiful clothes which is more than what I had all I had was funny smelling clothes bought at the second hand shop and hand me down sneakers from my brother with holes in the soles and toes. Everything beautiful came from America and when we had lived there I had been warm.
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