Chapter 9: May Holidays and Winter Term 1961

We had mock exams in the last week of the first term. Our teachers in each subject would give us a question from a recent School Certificate paper, with half an hour to answer it, and then after collecting our answers for marking, would go over a model answer in the remaining fifteen minutes of the class.

Aapi was still smarter than me, but we both found the exercise relatively easy. Mr Smythe used our homeroom time to gee us up. “Remember you’re shooting for more than eighty! An average of seventy-five won’t get you into the scholarship class.”

I decided I didn’t care, but at that stage I kept that very quiet, both from the teachers and from all my relatives. Aapi did care. His uncle and aunt, and all his family in Samoa never let him forget he had been chosen, and was carrying the honour and hopes of his family on his shoulders. He wanted a National Scholarship.

I was disappointed the cricket season was over. We were (as Mr Smythe put it) developing into a ‘pretty good team’. I was regularly batting at No six, and averaging in the low twenties, and bowling first change unless the wicket particularly suited the quicker bowlers.

I was looking forward to working with Frank in the holidays. He was taking on some quite big remodelling jobs and could always use (and pay for) extra help – particularly as I had now developed a variety of skills, and I was still thinking really hard about a car of my own.

Then Robert got badly hurt on the farm. Mum rang the last Friday night of the term. We were having a ‘celebratory study group’, before our usual shift at Mary’s World, and a call from Mum at that time was very unusual. She had just heard from Grandma Henley, who had rung asking for help.

Robert had been both unlucky and lucky. The Henley farm in the South Waikato hill country ran a couple of thousand sheep and a couple of hundred cattle, and Robert had had the misfortune to find himself inside a pen in the yards when one of the steers got frisky and shoved him against the rail.

That was the unlucky bit. Robert was pretty tough, but the human body is not designed to be sandwiched between twelve hundred pounds of prime beef and a six by four yard rail. He wound up with four badly broken ribs, a lot of pain and shock, and difficulty in breathing properly. He was bluish by the time Bruce got rid of the steer and left him to run to the phone back at the house.

The lucky bit was that the local doctor knew about what they used to call ‘flail chest’ and relayed instructions for Uncle Bruce to give Robert ‘mouth to mouth’ while they were waiting for an ambulance. That (as we learned later) might very well have saved Robert’s life, but Bruce nevertheless blamed himself for the situation.

I was on the bus for Otorohanga first thing on Saturday morning, and Uncle Bruce met me at the depot on his way back from visiting Robert in the hospital in Hamilton. Robert was in a lot of pain and would be unfit for farm work for a couple of months, but was ultimately expected to make a full recovery. I was needed to ‘fill in’ until the Henleys could find a suitable farmhand as a temporary replacement.

They were very pleased to see me. Autumn/early winter is not usually a particularly busy time in the NZ hill country, and the switch to ‘pre lamb shearing’ that Bruce had instituted when Grandma Henley had broken her hip the year before had reduced the autumn workload further.

But they were under pressure to get ready for topdressing. The farm was too steep to spread fertiliser from trucks, and like most of the rest of the NZ hill country, production was supported by applying superphosphate from the air. Bruce had booked a plane and loader for two days topdressing the following week, and if the weather held, we would need to clear the stock off the farm airstrip and clean it up, make sure the loading bin was clean, and then muster the stock off the blocks to be top-dressed. I was interested, since I had never been on the farm in the May holidays before, and had never been around aerial topdressing.

As things worked out, I was more than interested. I was busy. Bruce was very keen to get away to visit Robert in hospital in Hamilton every evening, so I found myself ‘stepping up’. Their old Fordson tractor had the capacity to mount a blade, and by Sunday afternoon, I found myself smoothing humps and hollows on the farm ‘airstrip’.

When Grandpa Henley was still alive he had seen arial topdressing as the ‘way to go’ and had contracted a local guy with a bulldozer to flatten out the top of the ridge above the house and yards and outbuildings. ‘Flattened’ is a generous description. The ‘airstrip’ was about 400 feet long and sloped quite sharply downhill.

Straight after the war, superphosphate was delivered by modified Tiger Moths, but now the specially designed Fletchers could spread a ton at a time. Both types of aircraft would take off downhill, accelerating into the air as the sloping runway dropped away beneath them, and land uphill after dropping their loads, hitting the brakes hard as soon as they touched, then taxiing to the bin and loader to have their hoppers refilled before taking off again. I was looking forward to watching that.

But first we had to muster to clear the stock from the blocks to be fertilised. Bruce had three dogs and Robert had five. A couple of them (as Bruce informed me) would ‘work for anyone’, so between Bruce’s three and Robert’s two, we had five dogs and the muster went relatively smoothly.

So did the topdressing. Around 8am, a ten-ton truck arrived towing a loader, and wound its way up the hill to the airstrip and loading bin. After unhooking the loader, it backed up to the three sided concrete ‘bin’ and tipped out it’s load of fertiliser. The truck and its driver departed to bring another ten tons of super, and the loader driver and Uncle Bruce smoked and exchanged local gossip for ten minutes or so until a Fletcher flew up the valley below us and climbed a few feet to land. Loading the plane’s hopper took less than five minutes, and it took off down the slope again, returning six or seven minutes later for another load. Four tons of superphosphate spread in an hour!

And so it went. Topdressing was followed by a week repairing and maintaining fences. I was nowhere near as strong and fit as Robert had been, and far less skilled and knowledgeable, but Bruce was patient and willing to teach me, and I was willing to learn, so between us we did quite well.

Robert came out of hospital in the middle of my second week, but he was still far from recovered and in a lot of pain. He spent a lot of time in bed, and when he was able to get up, he moped around the house until Grandma Henley let him help with the cooking between rests and handed back some of the farm bookwork she had reclaimed when she returned home after her convalescence the previous year.

Uncle Bruce was still looking for suitable help when I had to return for school, and Grandma Henley brought me back to Auckland so she could spend a couple of days with Mum. She let me drive, and I came home with another sack of mutton and another sixteen quid for my car fund.

After two weeks of sex with myself, it was really nice to reconnect with Pauline. She had missed me too. Our first sex after our break was pure hormone driven horniness, but after a couple of orgasms each, we both got into a very tender loving space and seemed to stay that way as the term progressed.

The start of the second term was strange. There was no way I was willing to risk another concussion by playing soccer, and even though ‘Soapy’ Bliss was clearly disappointed to lose his star midfielder, Dad backed me up.

“Your decision David. Personally, I think you’d be crazy to risk it, but I know what it’s like to be told you’re not allowed to play when you feel fit and you want to.” I presumed he was referring to being forced to abandon his rugby career after the war, but I suspected the subject was delicate, so I just told him I was unwilling to risk further damage to my brain.

Mr Nicholls called me aside during our first maths class of the term.

“A word Kerr.”

“Yessir?”

“Your Dad is Eric Kerr?”

“Yessir.”

“Fred Allen’s squad before the war?”

“Yessir.”

“Mr Bliss was very impressed with the fitness training he did with the First Soccer Eleven. Do you think he’d be willing to consider working with the First Fifteen?”

“I know he loved rugby and still does sir, and he learned lots from Fred Allen about what he calls ‘training at the edge’.”

“We couldn’t pay him much, but there’d be something for his time. Would you ask if he would be willing to talk to me?”

“Yessir!”

I did and he was, so for each winter term for the rest of my school career, and for quite a few years after that, Dad was the ‘fitness coach’ for the Rugby, Soccer, and Hockey squads. He would probably have made more money by doing more surveying, but from the energy and enthusiasm he showed it was clear that he loved his involvement, and the effects on the performance of the teams was certainly marked.

No soccer practices, and no game on Saturday gave me another nine or ten hours a week, and if I had been serious about School Cert marks leading to the ‘Scholarship sixth’ class with a good prospect of getting a National scholarship, I would have spent more than half of them in extra study. In fact, I did no more study at all. Instead, I worked a full day each Saturday with Uncle Frank, and effectively slacked off straight after school. I would come straight home, raid the fridge, and ‘chill out’ (though it would be another forty years before I heard that expression) instead of running round like a demented rabbit three afternoons a week. The fact that Pauline would usually visit for one of them was a bonus.

Frank noticed. He hit me up as we were finishing dinner on Thursday in the second week of term. “You heard about the guy who robbed a bank and got away with twelve grand.?”

I was puzzled. “No. Should I have?”

He grinned. “When they caught him a month later, there was none left!”

I was still puzzled. “And?”

He kept grinning. “They asked him how he’d spent it?”

I didn’t know where this was going or what it was about. “And?”

Frank became deadpan. “They asked him to account for the money. He said he had spent ten grand on booze, parties, drugs, and high-priced whores, then he looked sad and confessed he had wasted the rest!”

I was slightly irritated. “I get the joke, but I don’t know why you told it.”

“You’ve got extra time now that you’re not playing soccer, but you’re not using it productively. You’re working for me on Saturdays, and I’ve no complaints about that. You’re bloody good. But you’ve got School Cert at the end of the year, and if you want to give yourself a chance for a scholarship you need to pull your finger out.”

I had no idea what to say, but bulls and horns... “I don’t want to swot all the time. I don’t want to push myself to get into the scholarship class and then push myself really hard for two years to maybe get a scholarship. I don’t even know if I want to go to varsity if I’m honest.” I found I couldn’t look at Frank, but I took a deep breath and went on. “I know that Mum ‘n Dad and the Grandkerrs expect me to go on and get a degree, but I’m not sure I want to do that. At least not straight from school.”