Transported

by Tim Jones

  Mummy let Davy go in the sea, and sometimes she threw sticks way out into the water for him to chase. Davy ran into the waves and started to swim after them. Usually he found them and carried them back in his mouth, but once he couldn't find the stick Mummy had thrown. He swam around in circles and then he started swimming away into the sea. Mummy called 'Davy!' very loud. She was scared that he might swim away for ever and not come back. Emma was scared, too, and she called as well. Davy came back after a while and ran to Mummy. She told him off and said she was never going to throw him a stick again. Davy shook himself and got Mummy all wet.

  Mummy said it was time for a rest. She sat down on a log and had a smoke. Emma sat near her and looked for the moon. She loved the moon. She was too little to stay up all night and watch it, but sometimes you could see it in the day. She looked and looked, and then she saw it. It was hard to see.

  There were some birds, and Davy chased them. He almost caught one, but then it flew away. The birds were black and white, and had funny red legs. They walked along the sand until Davy got very near to them, then they flew away. They made a funny noise, too. It made Emma feel lonely. She was happy when she and Mummy started walking again.

  It took a long time to get to the picnic place. Emma got very tired, and she could hardly walk. Even Davy was just trotting along beside them with his tongue hanging out. 'I'm sorry, dear,' said Mummy, 'I had no idea it was this far. Isn't everything such a long way in this country?' Emma didn't know what a country was.

  Where they stopped to eat, there were some tables with little seats along the side of them — picnic tables, Mummy called them. There were some swings and a slide, too.

  They didn't use the picnic tables, because Mummy had brought a blanket that she laid on the ground. It was red and white. There were sandwiches, and cakes, and Mummy had some coffee in a flask. 'That's Daddy's flask,' said Emma. She remembered him carrying it one time.

  'That's right, dear,' said Mummy. 'I've got some fizz for you.' It was in a brown bottle.

  Emma said she wanted to do wees, and Mummy took her behind some bushes. If this was a proper picnic ground, Mummy said, there would be some toilets. Everything in this country is so primitive, she said. Emma said she would like to have a play now.

  After Emma had played on the swings and the slide, she helped put away the picnic things. Mummy had another smoke, then they started walking back down the beach. By the time they got back to their house, it was getting dark. The moon was a lot brighter, and the sun had gone away. 'Look, Mummy,' said Emma, 'the sun has gone in a hole.' Mummy smiled and told her she was a good girl.

  The next day Emma went to kindergarten. She didn't like it very much, and she often told Mummy that she wanted to stay home and help her instead, but Mummy said she had to go, because it was good for her to play with other children. Emma didn't think it was good at all, because she didn't like those children. They were silly and nasty, and they called her names. They weren't her friends. She had lots of friends where they used to live. Now just Davy and her doll Judy and Teddy were her friends. Mummy was her friend, too, but Mummy was a bit grumpy sometimes.

  At the kindergarten, there was a teacher called Mrs Scott. Mrs Scott was quite nice, and if Emma was upset she gave her a cuddle, but then she said she had to go away and play again. Emma liked to play with the dolls and the tea set. She liked to play with the cars, too.

  She had some cars at home, and sometimes Mummy bought her a new car. When she got a new car, she would take it to visit all the other cars. The new car would say 'Hello' to each of her old cars. The old car would ask, 'What's your name?', then the new car would say its name, and they would have a talk.

  When all the cars had said hello to the new car, Emma would line the cars up on the living room floor and drive them across to the kitchen. Sometimes they got stuck in the mud, and the big bulldozer had to push them out. The big bulldozer was a present from Daddy. There were big bulldozers like that where he was working. She wanted to go and live with Daddy and drive bulldozers and graders and make roads, like Daddy did. Mummy could come and live there, too.

  There were lots of cars at the kindergarten. Whenever Emma started playing with the cars at the kindergarten, boys grabbed them off her. One day, when she had got all the cars at the kindergarten lined up, a boy kicked them all away and hit her. Then she hit him back. When Emma told on the boy, Mrs Scott said, 'Well, dear, the cars are mainly for the boys to play with. Why don't you come and play with the tea set? You like that, don't you?' So Emma went and played with the tea set.

  Today they had painting. They put on special aprons, and Mrs Scott gave them big sheets of brown paper and the different paints, and a brush each, and water to wash it in. Emma heard Mrs Scott tell one of the other ladies that she didn't enjoy painting much, because everything got so messy, but that it was important for the children to express themselves.

  Emma was good at painting. She painted trees, and flowers, and bulldozers, and the house they used to live in before they went on the big ship. She tried to paint Davy, too, but he came out looking all funny.

  Her mummy came to take her home. Mrs Scott said, 'Can I have a word with you, Mrs Walters?' Mummy and Mrs Scott talked for a long time, and then they looked at Emma's pictures. Mummy looked worried. She said, 'Emma, darling, why are your pictures always so black? The houses are black, the trees are black, even the people are black.'

  'There's some red there,' said Emma. 'That's a flower.'

  'They're very nice pictures, dear,' said Mummy. She looked at her watch and said it was time to catch the bus.

  'Don't worry too much, Mrs Walters,' said Mrs Scott. 'It's bound to take her time to adjust. You know, I've got friends from Home who—'

  'Yes, I'm sure we'll be quite all right, thank you,' said Mummy, and they went to catch the bus. Mummy let Emma pull the cord when it was time to get off. When they arrived home, Emma went to see Davy, who was tied up in his kennel. He was very pleased to see her.

  The next day, Emma was playing in the front garden when she saw the postman. He said 'Hello' to her. Davy barked at him, but Emma said 'Hello' back. 'There's some mail for you and your mummy,' said the postman. 'Do you want to take it to her?' Emma said she did. There were two letters. They both had stamps with a picture of a lady's head.

  'That's a bill,' said Mummy, putting the first letter to one side, 'but this one's a letter from Daddy!'

  'I want to read it,' said Emma.

  'You come and sit up here next to me, and we'll both read it.' So they sat on the sofa and read Daddy's letter. Emma didn't know how to read, so she looked at the words on the page and thought about Daddy.

  'Well, dear, Daddy's written a special letter just for you. This is what it says. "Dear Emma" — there's the letter E for Emma — "I hope you are well, and that you are enjoying life by the sea. Mummy tells me that you are going to kindergarten. Have you made friends with any of the other children? I wish you and Mummy could come and live with me, but Mr Jackson, who is in charge of the construction work here, says that the house for us all to live in won't be ready for another six months. That's a long time to wait, but in two more months I will be coming home for Christmas to see you. Please be a good girl and do what Mummy says. Love, Daddy."'

  Then Emma cried because she missed Daddy. When she had stopped crying, Mummy said, 'Daddy's written an extra bit, called a PS. It says "I was talking today with Mr O'Rourke, who drives the big grader, and he promised that he would give you a ride on it when you and Mummy come to live here. That's something to look forward to! Love, Dad."'

  Emma was very excited about having a ride on the grader. She asked if she would have to have a big sleep before she could ride on it, and Mummy said, 'I'm afraid so, dear. Quite a few big sleeps.' So Emma asked Mummy to get her toy grader and bulldozer, the ones Daddy had bought for her, and she went out to the sandpit and played for hours and hours. The sandpit was near the back fence, and when the grader and the bulldozer were tired from push
ing lots of sand and needed to have a sleep, Emma went to the back fence and looked out between the boards at the sea. A big ship was sailing there. Emma rushed inside and woke Mummy, who was having a nap.

  'Mummy! I saw our ship!'

  Mummy had a look over the fence, and then Mummy and Emma quickly put on their coats and went down to the beach. A stiff northerly was blowing, and the wind whipped up the waves and sent the sand hissing along the beach, so that Mummy picked up Emma and held her close. A white ship was sailing out of the harbour, a large white ship with 'P&O' on the funnel. 'It's not a ferry, is it, Mummy? It's our ship, that we came on!'

  'Our ship, going Home,' agreed Mummy. Mummy talked about 'Home' a lot. She looked sad when she talked about it. Emma thought Home was the place she used to live with Mummy and Daddy, before they came here. Emma liked it at Home. She had friends there who were other children. Mummy used to have the other mummies over for tea. They would laugh and talk a lot. Home had a horse that lived in the field behind their house, and a big building down the lane with blades that went round and round in the wind. Mummy told her that was where the miller lived.

  Emma slipped from Mummy's grasp and ran along the shore. If she could catch the ship, she could go home and be with all her friends, and play in the garden with the apple trees and the swing.

  The big ship was going fast along the channel on the outward tide. Emma ran into the waves. The water was deep and cold, and suddenly a wave came and swept over the top of her gumboots. Emma stumbled backwards and sat down, and just then Mummy picked her up, and smacked her bottom, and asked her what in goodness' name she was doing, and didn't she know she could have drowned? But Emma just said, 'I want to go on the ship, Mummy. I want to go Home!' She started to shiver.

  'Oh, you're wet through!' said Mummy. She wrapped Emma in her big coat and carried her back to their rented wooden bungalow, with the blue paint peeling in the saltladen wind, and the stillborn flowers in the garden, and the crates full of their former lives, still sealed with metal strips, standing in Emma's bedroom with 'Not Wanted on Voyage' stencilled across them in large, black letters.

  JIM CLARK

  When we get up, it's hosing down, so we take the car. If race day is sunny, we usually walk, though it's a long way for my eight-year-old legs. Today the rain stops as the line of traffic crawls its way towards Teretonga, and the Southland summer sun tries to find a way through.

  Our red Mini pulls into the car park at Sandy Point Domain. White-coated marshals from the Southland Car Club direct the car along narrow tracks through the marram grass and collect the parking fee. Finally the car comes to a halt at the end of a row of other cars. Dad takes up his haversack, which contains our raincoats and the food Mum has packed for us. We set off under the pines and between the dunes.

  The sound that draws us onwards is the sound of excitement, that note somewhere between a sewing machine and a hornet, magnified a thousand-fold, painful and beautiful, that waxes and wanes as each car approaches and recedes. 'Hurry up,' I say to Dad, 'or we'll miss the race!' We keep going until, from the top of a low sandhill, we can see the last two laps of the current race. It's the Mini 7s, at the sewing machine end of the sonic spectrum, their drivers flinging the brave little machines along the back straight and into the sweeping right-hander. They race around the corner and out of our sight. On the main straight, someone is bringing out a chequered flag. A final crescendo from that direction, drifting towards us on the wind, then the engines fall silent.

  There are a thousand places to sit and stand. Amid the low dunes and the lupins, families have staked out their vantage points on the dry, sandy soil. Local haulage firms have turned the backs of sheep trucks into grandstands for the day. We are heading for the main grandstand, a lengthy assemblage of planks and scaffolding on the north side of the main straight.

  It's a long walk down the back straight, round the hairpin, and along half of the main straight to the grandstand, where marshals stand ready to exact a further toll. As we walk, the silence is broken by another roar of engines, throatier than the previous batch, deeper: the Big Bangers, Australian and American V8s, have come out to play. They accelerate like stampeding rhinos and turn like pigs, and the point of the hairpin is the perfect place to view their almost comical inability to take corners. I want to stand there for the rest of the race, but Dad hasn't forgotten that two kids around my age were killed at Teretonga two years ago when a car went off the track and smashed into them. He hurries me away to somewhere a little higher and a lot safer.

  'I wish the V8s were racing the Minis today,' I say when we've got to the end of the home straight. Dad agrees. We like nothing better than to see the Minis dart past the V8s under braking and hold them off through the curves along the back of the course, though everyone knows that the V8s will roar to the front again along the home straight, leaving the Minis in their wake on the final run to the flag.

  Six laps of thunder, and a two-abreast race towards the chequered flag; someone has won and someone has lost, but there's no telling who from this distance. It doesn't matter, anyway. We're here for the big race, the 1968 Teretonga International, Round 4 of the Tasman Series. Every year the world's top Formula One drivers — men like Jackie Stewart, Piers Courage, and New Zealand's own Bruce McLaren, Denny Hulme and Chris Amon — come down under for eight weeks of racing: four weeks in New Zealand and four more in Australia. In 2.5 litre cars, they spend summer racing around the narrow, bumpy circuits of Australasia, with the local racers in smaller, older cars trailing along behind them. All the Formula One heroes whose exploits we devour each month in Motor Sport magazine walk among us for a few hours — or, at least, they walk around the pits and the infield. And then their cars are rolled out to the grid, four abreast on the narrow track, and they get down to work.

  It will be the best part of an hour before the big race starts. We climb up the widely spaced planks of the grandstand and take our seats halfway up, about a hundred yards down the track from the start-finish line. From here, we will be able to see the cars accelerating along the main straight, braking for the hairpin, and then making their way along the short back straight and into the Esses, where we'll lose sight of them among the dunes.

  The sun ducks and dives between the clouds. The wind is still chilly, and I sit next to Dad, huddled in my raincoat, while he takes the lunchbox and the Thermos out of the haversack. On race days, I get to drink coffee from the Thermos. We eat filled rolls and fruit cake. There's orange juice as well.

  Neither Mum nor my sister wanted to go to the racing. We'll be happy at home, they said. You go and enjoy yourselves.

  It's never happened before, and I don't know why it happens now. Maybe, tummy full and mind at ease, I fall asleep for a moment. The next thing I know, I'm lying on the ground, looking up at a tangled view that resolves itself into wooden planks, metal scaffolding, and the anxious faces of my father and two adults I don't know. Bits of me are sore.

  'Ask him something,' says a woman.

  'How many fingers am I holding up?' asks Dad.

  'Two,' I reply. I start to sit up, but the woman shakes her head.

  'Where are we?' Dad asks, pushing me gently back down.

  'At Teretonga, of course! We're not missing the race, are we?' Then I realise that's a silly question. There are no motors revving, no one's changing through the gears.

  'I'm not hurt,' I say. 'What happened?'

  'I don't know,' says Dad. 'There was a shout and a thump. When I turned round, I couldn't see you. This lady said you'd fallen between the planks.'

  'Out like a light, you were,' says the lady. The man beside her, his face red below a trilby hat, nods solemnly.

  'How do you feel?' asks Dad.

  'All right, but I think I scraped my side.'

  There is some grazing and a long, shallow cut. Dad reaches up for the haversack, gets out the first aid kit, and treats me with Savlon and plasters. 'What do you think?' he asks.

  'I'm fine,' I say. 'H
ow do we get back up?'

  'You need to watch out,' says the lady, 'these things don't always show up right away. Watch for a strawcoloured fluid coming out of his nose, persistent headaches, unexplained memory loss, that sort of thing.'

  'Do you have a headache?' asks the man in the trilby hat.

  'No, thanks,' I reply.

  I can see from Dad's expression that he has received all the help and advice from strangers that he can tolerate, but that he doesn't wish to be rude. 'I'll be fine,' I assure the watching couple. 'I think the race must be starting soon.'

  Dad escorts me out to the edge of the grandstand, then we clamber back to our seats. Dad tells me I still have a head for heights.

  The lady and the man with the hat take their places to our right. The lady smiles at me as she sits down. I smile back.

  No sooner have we sat down than another skiff of rain comes over, wetting us, wetting the track. I sit there feeling damp, cold and miserable. I think of Mum and my sister, safe and warm at home. I feel like crying. Then the sun comes out, leading the Tasman Series cars onto the grid.

  Our hero isn't some showy European or exotic South American. Our hero is Jim Clark, a farmer's son from Fifeshire. He made his name in rallies and hill climbs in Scotland before switching to single seaters and becoming the best Formula One driver of his generation. I can imagine being Jim Clark, a modest man with a special gift for driving fast. Of course, everyone out there has that gift, even the slowest back-marker trundling around the course in a second-hand Brabham, but Jim Clark is faster than anyone else.

  There is nothing like the sound of twenty-one singleseater racing cars firing up on the grid, then accelerating, as slowly at first as a Saturn V rocket leaving the launchpad, down the main straight. They race past the grandstand and along to the hairpin, where, as close as possible to the corner, they decelerate again, downshifting through the gears. By the time they get there, Jim Clark is already in the lead, his Lotus 49T — sleeker, fitter, faster — a lowslung blur down the back straight and into the esses. The rest of the cars straggle out behind him, and the scream of engines recedes into the distance as they negotiate the far side.