by Fiona Kidman
As he knelt beside me in the school grounds, splendid in his mustard pants and corduroy jacket, he said, ‘You have to pass maths, Magog. Try, won’t you? It’s the only way. You must get through them. You’ll fly through the rest. You only have to get a thirty per cent pass and the rest of your subjects will carry your average.’
‘If only you taught us maths instead of Tweedledum,’ said Phyllis, referring to the headmaster.
‘I’m good but not that much,’ Rad said, mocking, with false pride.
‘It’s all right. They’re not so bad,’ I said, for maths seemed to be an indifferent subject to talk about when all I had been doing was loving Geoff.
A cloud of elegantly cool perfume assailed us, and without looking up, we knew that Danny Ferry was on his way. An old man, he ambled towards us, his arms full of magnolia blooms, with petals as wide as our hands. He stopped at the school fence and nodded.
‘It won’t be long now,’ he said.
We smiled agreement.
‘I’ll have a flower for you,’ he murmured. ‘Here, take one now,’ and he handed us each a magnolia, the boys smiling sheepishly, except Rad, who pretended to look the other way.
We smiled again, understanding. He walked on up the street, to his house with its open door and dim interior.
‘He’s a dreadful man,’ said Rad, savagely.
‘He is not,’ I said, sharply. ‘He’s kind and good, and he’s never done us harm.’
‘God, you’re sentimental, Magog,’ he said. ‘You’re just a great wet flabby emotional mess. Why don’t you try to grow up?’
I threw stones viciously against each other on the ground, trying not to cry.
‘What’s so good about him?’
‘He believes in God,’ I said childishly. ‘Do you?’
‘Oh for Chrissake —’ he started, and grinned at himself. ‘That’s not much good is it? He’s a lucky old bastard, isn’t he then, eh?’
We were silent.
‘Damn you all,’ he said. ‘Damn you. Of course it would be good, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it be good to believe in God and pick flowers to give to people, like he does? Sure, I’d like to be like that, oh yes, I would. It would be comfortable, relaxing, oh yes.’
‘I’m sorry, Rad,’ I said. ‘Don’t be mad at us.’
‘It’s all right,’ he said.
We watched the old man out of sight. He was a legend in those parts, Danny the Ferry Boat Man. For years no one had ever called him anything but Danny Ferry. What his real name was I have forgotten, but so long had he been known by the other, that it didn’t matter any more. And it was through him that that magnolia tree had staked out a special claim in our lives.
He was a man of great learning, and while he had plied the old ferry each day down the edge of the coast in years past, picking up a little cream, delivering some mail, carrying a bit of cargo, he had his books there too. They said he could tell you anything. I think he probably could.
He never locked his house, though it had been burgled twice, and he had lost a great deal. Keeping open house for his friends was more important than the value of his possessions, Danny said, and nothing so trivial as what had happened to him was going to make him change his habits.
He loved children, and he loved that magnolia tree. He had tended it when he was a child, and it was a little tree, and he had watched it grow. It was on public property, standing just outside the church fence, but of course people in our district never thought of it that way. It was Danny Ferry’s tree, and he made sure that it gave more pleasure to people by being his tree, than if everybody had laid claim to it, and expounded the policies of ‘keep off the grass’ usually accorded to communal vegetation. If any of our people were sick in hospital down at Whangarei when spring came, then Danny sent them magnolias on the bus, and paid for a special delivery from the depot. Everyone could help themselves, and there would still be more magnolias than you could count in a year. Each Sunday, the inside of the church, as well as the outside, would be overflowing with branches of great luminous petals, and a magnificent, powerful scent, which made the senses gasp and flutter. The magnolias had travelled down the coast each Monday morning aboard the ferry, in years past, and at each stop they would be unloaded to eager farmers’ wives.
In time Danny became too old for the ferry, and he retired to grow flowers, and each year to supervise the School Certificate and University Entrance for the district high school, taking the pupils in the seclusion of the church hall.
He had never done any teaching, but the authorities who had given him the job were glad to have him, keeping him on year after year. The first morning of the examination, on each desk there would be placed a large bar of chocolate and a magnolia, the last November ones, from the lowest branches. Danny could not let an opportunity pass to give his magnolias away. They became a link between his love for the children, and that tree.
Once, long ago, one of the pupils had placed his magnolia in a bottle of ink. Each vein, each delicate thread of life, had taken the colour of the ink, so that the bloom was a pale translucent blue. From that year on, it became a symbol, a talisman. The blue flower, held proudly after the exam, set you apart, the little select band who held the school’s hopes, the parents’ fears and earnest desires, the children’s gateway to a world beyond.
I looked down at the flower lying in my hands. ‘The flowers though, they’re beautiful, Rad.’
He looked at them grudgingly. ‘You’re not going to stick them in the ink are you?’
‘Who told you that?’ David asked.
‘Oh, I heard it in the staff room. It made me puke.’
‘Don’t you see,’ said David, ‘that he wants for us the same things you think we should have? Don’t you know that he wants us to pass those damn’ exams too?’
‘Yes, go off on a cloud of sentiment and tradition. Follow my steps, devout disciples, be good sweet maids. Ugh, nonsense. Do you mean to tell me you’d come out waving a bit of ink-soaked vegetation to show you’d sat an examination?’
They were good days that followed though, in spite of these odd bouts of scratchiness and dissent, and even these served to excite our senses and make us more aware of the profound changes which were taking place in our outlook.
In this mood of excesses and delights, we saw November inch forward. School Certificate was sat by a few younger pupils. We watched them spending miserable days between the church hall and school, exhibiting the ink-stained petals of their magnolias, and munching left-over chocolate bars.
Then it was nearly our turn, and right in the last days, things started to go wrong. Influenza struck; Geoff and Phyllis’s parents, whose properties backed each other, started losing cows with bloat, which was disastrous, as they both had so little to begin with, and a flash flood went through our farm one night, taking stock with it before I and my father and young brother could make it to the lower paddocks. As if that wasn’t enough, David’s father got drunk and beat up his mother who was twice as big as he was and broke his arm by way of retaliation. We were all dead beat and our spirits were way down low.
Rad would come over to the patch by the fence where we spent the lunch hour, and shake his head when none of us responded to him. By the last day I think we could all four of us have thrown in the whole thing. When Rad came I was leaning my head against the worn rock at the back of the shelter shed and the others were lying on the ground, snuffling the last of their colds into handkerchiefs.
‘What are you doing, Magog?’ he said. ‘Praying?’
‘As a matter of fact I was,’ I replied coolly. Any objection?’
He burst out laughing, took a last drag on the cigarette he was smoking, and threw it on the ground, then squatted alongside of us, rocking on his heels, his hands on his knees. ‘Oh you’re funny, you’re priceless, you kids.’
‘You can laugh,’ I said stiffly. ‘You’ve passed your exams. What do you know about us? You can laugh at us if you like, but we’re kids and you’
re grown-up. That’s what it says in the record books anyway.’
He looked at me somberly. ‘You’re in a bad way, aren’t you? So you think it was easy for me to pass exams?’
‘Well, you were in the city. It was a bit different to this, wasn’t it?’ I replied.
‘Some day, Magog, I’ll take you past where I lived in the city. Rusty roofs and tumbledown fences, corrugated iron in the windows and broken steps, great dollops of dirt and fish an’ chips papers everywhere and the old man’s puke on the verandah from where nobody had cleaned up the night before when he was drunk. Inside, no, I can’t tell you about the inside really, but I can tell you about the place where I did my homework. Broken electric light bulb, had to buy new ones out of my pocket money, that’s if I got any, and if I didn’t I pinched it. And the noise, all night the noise, the trains shunting.’
‘Rad, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘My father, last time I saw him, he called me a lousy little punk ’cause I wasn’t following in his footsteps, and doing a decent job of work, a man’s job, he called it.’
‘Rad, please stop,’ I cried to him. ‘Please.’
And you kids wonder why I question tradition. Blind faith. Do you have blind faith in what everyone tells you is right — because it’s what your fathers did?’
He was silent, and so were we. I felt the others looking at me, accusingly, yet it didn’t worry me, because I knew they were accusing themselves as much as me. I had only said the things they were thinking. It was for him I was worried.
A muscle flickered round his beautiful mouth. ‘You kids made it good for me here. I wish I could have done something for you. I’d like to have seen you … do something.’ He stood up.
‘Rad,’ I said, tentatively. ‘If there was something we could do —?’
‘Pass your exams,’ he replied shortly.
‘We could have a milkshake tonight after school.’
Rad smiled at last. ‘Okay, see you tonight.’
He turned to leave. It may have been coincidence that, at that moment, Danny Ferry approached down the street again, but thinking back it cannot have been. I remember now that his sister came over from where she kept house for an old couple on the other side of the village three times a week to prepare a meal for Danny. So, on those three days, he would have to be home from his walks at one, for his sister was a strict woman, who vowed that the Lord only listened to their Grace before meals at an appointed time, and that time was Monday, Wednesday and Friday, at one o’clock.
Danny stopped to talk and his arms held magnolias. Always neat, he seemed sprucer than usual, possibly because it was examination time. The tufts of hair in his ears had been neatly clipped, his white hair and moustache shone silver and the gold watch chain across his chest was polished brightly.
‘Tomorrow, only till tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Here, I was taking flowers home for my sister, but you’ll enjoy them more.’
He held out the flowers. I looked at him from where I sat and in doing so, I intercepted Rad’s cool stare.
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘but no, they would wilt before I reached home.’
Nervously, the others looked at me and then at Rad, and then at Danny.
‘Not today, thanks,’ said Geoff.
‘I think I’ll leave them for now, too,’ Phyllis said.
David looked undecided. For a moment he wavered, then seeing our eyes on him, he said, ‘Another time perhaps. But thanks anyway.’
The old man looked at Rad, then looked away. I experienced sudden sharp pain deep inside. He withdrew the flowers a little awkwardly, his smile resting briefly on us. ‘Yes, well,’ he said, cheerfully, ‘my sister would have been sorry to have missed her ration I expect. Goodbye, then, till tomorrow.’
We muttered, and he moved quickly down the street, towards his house, with its cool understated light and old portraits staring grimly down from every wall, and his sister, their replica, at the head of his table.
The four of us got up, for the bell was ringing. Together we mooched towards the school building, not caring much to look at each other, or talk. Only Rad seemed buoyant and careless, and by the time we reached the classroom his mood was beginning to infect us, so that when we sat down defiance was growing in us. We looked around again, surreptitiously at first, then boldly, and already our spirits had picked up on the last few days of misery we had had.
The afternoon seemed endless. The teachers were handling us like eggs. The last period of the day, the whole school sang together. We assembled in two classrooms between which the doors swung open to make one big room. This room served as our overcrowded assembly hall. We huddled in, while November turned on one of its hottest afternoons.
A cow outside our window roared painfully in a late season calving. As we watched, the juniors made callow remarks and sniggers, though, heaven knows, they had witnessed the spectacle often enough.
‘Ta-ta-te-teh,’ warbled the headmaster, who was also our singing teacher, and thought well of himself as such.
‘Ta-ta-te-teh,’ we bellowed back, dutifully.
Then we sang some dirge while the temperature rose steadily in the room, and at that point the woman from the office came in with a telegram. She went down the back of the room where Rad was standing and handed it to him. Everyone wanted to turn around, but in a minute he walked up the front and spoke to the Head, who had stopped the music.
Rad’s face was white and hard. He spoke to the Head, and you couldn’t hear what either of them said, until they were nearly finished, when, as Rad started to walk to the door, the other looked at his watch, and said, ‘You’ve got about half an hour to catch it, if you hurry.’
As he turned back to us, Rad looked at us near the front, very briefly, and I may have imagined it, but his hands seemed to gesture vaguely as he held the telegram.
When he had gone, the Head said, ‘I’m sure you’ll be sorry to hear that Mr Barclay’s father died earlier in the day. It’s nearly end-of-term so I don’t expect he’ll be back this year.’ The singing lesson proceeded, and that was that.
Stunned, we gathered in the dusty milkbar after school. None of us really believed what had happened, that he could have gone so quickly and left us without a word.
‘We have to do something,’ I said at last.
‘I can’t get through the next few days if we just leave things like this,’ said Phyllis.
The boys agreed.
Then someone did think of something, and this is what has worried me so often. Just who did think of this plan. At first it seemed ridiculous, then it took hold of us, and before any of us realised just what was happening, we were committed.
Late that night, we met in the village. We quietly stowed our bikes away behind the church fence, hot after long rides, for none of us lived less than two miles away and David and I had come nearly five, all of us still scared by our flits from sleeping homes.
It was just after midnight when we congregated under the tree, a very quiet, black midnight, the sort of languorous spring-coming-up-summer night that only the north can provide. Beside the stifling bump and thud of our own hearts, we could hear no sound.
It was a big tree, that magnolia, and an old one, but it did not have a great girth. The magnolia has slim branches, and the wood is not unduly hard. David and Geoff had a two-handled saw, which they used unskillfully but with results. It was surprisingly soon that the tree gave a sickening lurch. The boys tore out from underneath and we girls, stationed to watch for interruptions, leapt with them. We were on our bikes almost before it hit the ground.
Within moments we were speeding along the metalled road, gravel flying up and hitting our legs, a slight breeze suddenly zipping up against us, seeming like a howling gale trying to slow us down; and our breaths like sobs in our chests. We glanced back when we reached the top of the hill; below us at the policeman’s house, and at the Manse, lights had come on. They wouldn’t know in which direction to even start looking.
Before long we left and, parting with Geoff and Phyllis, David and I rode slowly towards our homes.
When morning came, the night seemed remote. It was like something we had heard on the radio, knowing it had happened, and that it was important to somebody, but not to us. That is until we got to the church hall, straggling up from school, the four of us not looking at each other.
Round the fallen tree there was a knot of people, children, storekeepers, just standing, not saying much. There were old women there, crying, not so you’d notice, but inside them all beat up, with just an odd tear on the outside. The old man, Danny Ferry, he was there too, not looking at a soul. He was using a pair of secateurs to pick the last flowers off the tree, and as he cut them he cast aside the crushed and broken ones, choosing the best and placing them in an old flax kit.
He straightened up when we approached. I didn’t want to look, but his eyes held fascination. I wanted the reassurance that he didn’t know who had done this thing to him. He dwelt on us for only a moment, but what I sought was not there. It was an imperceptible flicker which betrayed none of us, except to each other.
He went on ahead of us and in a few minutes called us in. On each desk there was a magnolia bloom, the very last ones of the season, or of any season.
I looked at my paper, mechanically realising that it was a good one, then picked up my pen and started to write, forcing my hand across the page. The words I had written stared back at me, meaningless. Glancing around, I saw that the others were having the same difficulty.