Category: Reminiscences

One morning we were walking past our local sailing club when I happened to espy a gentleman with a fancy, elongated camera. While I fully realised that he was presumably there to photograph scenes from a regatta that was soon to begin, I decided to see if he possessed a sense of humour.

I, therefore, with my arms outstretched, pronounced, “I’ve arrived! Snap away!”

Although he didn’t see any humour in what I’d exclaimed, the gentleman standing next to him did.

Tiki was once given a lengthy, carved and lacquered stick with a stout cord attached at its thicker end and a cap of rubber at the other. I carry it on our walks, in the hope of being able fend off any dog that might attack our greatly adoured canine.

As we were passing an elderly gentleman, who was clearly struggling to make forward progress, even with the assistance of his walking stick, I called out to him, “My stick’s longer than yours!”, as I held it up for him to observe.

Fortunately, he wasn’t offended by my double entendre and laughed heartily.

We were partaking of one of one of our regular walks when we passed two men, each using tiny trowels to leave a fancy pattern in the freshly laid concrete of a driveway.

As we passed their truck, I noticed that the wording ‘ROCK HARD PUMPING’ was emblazoned on the driver’s door.

This prompted me to tell Tiki that I had mischievously experienced the thought that I should ask the men if I could be provided with such a “transfusion”.

I’d been in New Zealand for six weeks, both hitchhiking and, when I deemed there to be insufficient traffic, travelling aboard public buses. It was via the latter that on the morning of the 8th March, 1975, I arrived at Milford Sound, having departed from Te Anau, in the far south of the country’s South Island.

After lunch, I wandered down to the port, hoping to board a boat, as the weather, as well as the scenery, certainly warranted it. I asked a gentleman as to how such a cruise could be achieved and was informed that I should look for a man who wore a captain’s hat and board his boat. I couldn’t actually see a gentleman who fitted this description and so I decided to board the boat of the one who appeared to be most closely aligned to it.

Initially, I was virtually on my own. However, quite suddenly this began to change as a horde of tourists filled the vessel to near capacity and seating was at a premium. So much so that the knees of the young woman seated opposite me were all but touching mine.

She was seated next a gentleman who’d not only placed his coat around her shoulders, but his left arm as well! A number of minutes passed, as I did my best to gaze from side to side, when, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, she remarked on the modernity of my camera. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I’d owned it since the second half of the previous decade and, instead, showed her the dial around its lens that could be rotated in order to correspond to the prevailing weather.

We continued to converse freely until I suddenly realised that the chivalrous gentleman, who’d been seated beside her, had disappeared, along with his coat! When I enquired as to his whereabouts, I was told that he was on another tour to her and that every time their respective buses would stop at the same attraction, he would centre his unwanted attentions upon her.

It was only then that I realised that I had boarded a chartered vessel for tourists who were travelling on pre-paid fares and that I had inadvertently returned to hitchhiking, again, only this time I was doing so on water!

We strolled about the vessel as it cruised the sound. I gazed in awe at the sheerness of Mitre Peak and during the journey back to the dock, the magnificent sight of the almost juxtaposed, tall waterfalls.

Once our feet had returned to terra firma I asked the young lady for her telephone number, as we had already established the fact that we were both Sydneysiders. She freely wrote it on a small piece of paper, as she stood in an upright position. It was accompanied by her christian name, which she said wouldn’t have been the one she would have chosen. This led me to quip that as we had met in New Zealand, I would nickname her ‘Tiki’.

Bruce, her bus driver, had noticed that we had grown close and, totally unexpectedly, instructed me, as there was one spare seat on the bus, to place my rucksack underneath the rear of his vehicle and that once his tourists had partaken of a meal at the ‘Lobster Pot’, I could travel the seventy-four miles back to Te Anau, with them. Meanwhile, I ventured off in search of a cheese sandwich.

I must admit that I felt a little concerned for Bruce’s job, for I had imagined that it would only have taken a complaint from a disgruntled passenger at having to share a part of their tour with a long-haired scruffy individual with thongs on his feet, to potentially place his position in jeopardy. Nevertheless, I was extremely grateful for the opportunity to spend more time with ‘Tiki’ and when we travelled through the lengthy, pitch black Homer Tunnel I was sorely tempted to give her a kiss. Later, she confessed that she was hoping that I had.

Upon our arrival we agreed to meet later, at a local pub. I, therefore, advised my landlord for the night that my return was likely to be at a late hour and he stressed to me that I was not to disturb his other guests.

As we danced, ‘Tiki’ questioned as to why I hadn’t removed my zipped plastic jacket. This led me to confess to her that my t-shirt possessed too many holes and to do so would only serve to embarrass her.

Nonetheless, she still invited me to her accommodation at one of the town’s motels, but only on the proviso that her unit’s front door remained fully open for the duration of my visit. She prepared a cup of coffee for each of us, as we continued to converse. We appeared to have so much in common, not the least of which was the fact that we’d both circumnavigated our country, she with her parents and younger sister, in a caravan, over a period of five months, and I, on a tour by bus that took nine weeks.

It was so late when I turned to leave that I explained of how my accommodation was a kilometre or two outside of the town and, therefore, as she was travelling on her own, expressed the wish that I might be allowed to occupy the spare single bed. This request, however, was firmly denied.

There was no moon that night and if the totally deserted road out of town hadn’t had the broken white lines along its centre, I wouldn’t have found my way back to my accommodation. I could hear the waters of Lake Te Anau off to my right and it was then that I remembered Bruce had informed us that it possessed a depth of a thousand feet. It’s silly, I know, but all of the while I was near to it I kept envisaging ‘The Creature From The Black Lagoon’ suddenly emerging from it.

Eventually, I reached my lodgings, only to have the front door begin to creak so loudly that I instantly remembered the landlord’s earlier ultimatum and decided that, without a torch, the rightful thing to do was to walk back into town and spend what was probably the next six hours hanging about its abandoned main street.

The temperature by this time must have been somewhere close to freezing point, for I certainly was! I was so fortunate that I’d been asked to a dance, for I had at least replaced my thongs with shoes. Each hour just dragged, even allowing for the fact that I’d found a discarded newspaper on a seat and, just for something to do, read some of its more relevant articles as I stood beneath a light in the street. This was replaced by a seemingly endless period of window shopping, as I tried to stay active.

I was never more please to witness a sunrise, in my life!

When we were young, our father decided to purchase two young kelpies, with the intention of training them to be sheepdogs. He certainly didn’t possess the patience nor, in hindsight, the expertise, either.

Therefore, it wasn’t long before he was throwing stones at them, in fits of rage.

This led to my younger sister and I taking it upon ourselves to display our pity for them by showing all of the love and affection we could muster. Something that was also to displease our father.

Some months later we arrived home from school, only to learn that we could not find the dogs anywhere and received the news from our parents that they had, indeed, taken it upon themselves to run away!

Not only were we brokenhearted, we found it to be incredulous that two animals that had loved us so dearly could have taken it upon themselves to suddenly depart from our lives.

Years later, Mum confided in us that our father had, indeed, taken it upon himself to convey the pair to one end of our farm, where he had proceeded to shoot them. Prior to burying their carcasses.

Tiki recently located my hidden fifty dollar notes. I receive twenty-five dollars per week, paid fortnightly, in exchange for completing certain household chores. Such a discovery led her to believe that she needed to also know my betting account’s pin number in order to know just how much was in that, too!

I replied, without thinking, “You’re not getting that! The only way you’ll get my pin number is to starve me!”

“Ooh! That sounds like a good idea. I hadn’t thought of that!”

We were on our diurnal walk last year when I sneezed twice or thrice in quick succession.

This prompted me to remark to Tiki, “I would like a dollar for every time I’ve sneezed this year!”

“I’d like a dollar for every time you’ve said that!”, Tiki retorted.

Richard, a tiler, visited us earlier this year. During our conversation, he recounted how a policeman had informed that if one owns a dog one is seventy per cent less likely to be burgled.

The officer added that if one goes to the trouble of placing a pair of workman’s boots outside one’s front door then then the chance of one’s property being burgled diminish even further.

Armed with this knowledge Richard visited his elderly mother and, knowing that she already had a dog, arranged for her to receive a pair of such boots to display outside her front door.

However, when he revisited her, he noticed that the boots had been painted and further to this, on a subsequent visit, could not fail to observe that each contained one of her favourite flowering plants.

Last year, Tiki asked me to prepare for her a cup of tea.

Having taken but a few sips, she was moved to utter that my offering tasted like nothing more than a mixture of milk and water. Prior to her exclaiming, “You did remember to use a teabag, didn’t you?”

I used my advanced age as an excuse.

Only the other day I recalled Tiki’s twenty-fourth birthday. My intention was to surprise her, knowing that she would have to walk through our house in order to open the doors to our garage.

Therefore, prior to me leaving to collect her from her place of work, at 6.35 p.m., I had lit the twenty-four candles. I had ringed the cake using the majority of them and employed those that remained by forming a small heart in its centre.

When she did open the doors to the garage and I had perceived no cheerful reaction on her face, I feared the worst.

Sure enough! Instead of her having come upon a cake with twenty-four candles aflame, there were that number of blobs of wax, with the red of their bases having melted into the cake’s icing and scarring the cake’s blue writing in the process.

While Tiki had sensed my disappointment, she loved the cake and was genuinely touched by the efforts I had made to surprise her.