Secrets have gone. Mono-culturalism has gone. The days when most families went to church on Sundays has gone. Nationalism, that worst of philosophies, was gone, though the rise of populism means it can come back at any time. Being sure about anything has gone. Only kindness and decency, and people reading books and making movies like Woman at War remain.
All anyone can hope for is to be happy with where they are now. I love our house, perching precariously on the hill, and I’m happy in Wellington, the place in New Zealand where—for the first time in my life—I feel that I fit. Though tomorrow, or in two minutes’ time, or in 200 years’ time, it could do what it often feels the rest of the country is impatiently wanting Wellington to get on with: shake itself into oblivion. I hope it’ll wait a while longer. I’ll never truly consider myself a New Zealander, or an anything-er, but I’m happy living here, because at the moment we have Jacinda, who somehow allows me to relax, just like it felt having a mother who knew how to cook, who welcomed my friends, who, with my father, picked up foreign hitch-hikers and took them home for a meal, and who was wise enough to tell us not to overtly look back. We could’ve stayed in France, and Robert could’ve owned a café and worn a beret and drunk white wine for breakfast with other broken-down ex-rugby players, and I could’ve ridden a bike with a basket full of baguettes and fresh cherries and spent weekends touring châteaux in the Dordogne. He could have taken up the offer of a scholarship to Cambridge; we could be living in the Cotswolds, the Lake District. I could’ve been writing novels about going slowly mad in Hampstead.
But we wanted our children to know their grandparents, so we stayed here. Here, because we have dozens of close, loved and loving friends, many of whom we’ve known since our children were small, or even before. The media somehow implies it’s only the unfortunate who die; even Lucie at three years old knew that to be nonsense. We have dear friends who are now in their graves or scattered to the winds. Mike Tafua, too lovely, too young; Red Parsons, Kate Clark, Paul Callaghan, Cushla Bretton, Heather Low. Oh, our darling Les Atkins, how could you forsake us?
But we’re so lucky because, best of all, we have family. Benedict and Julia, Flora and Edward are in Auckland. Flora is seven and except for her ability to run like the wind, just like her mother could, she reminds me most of myself as a child: keen, outgoing, she never knows when to shut up. She loves homework, she loves her teacher. She pleats the skin on my hand. ‘You’re old,’ she says, ‘But not very very old, so you won’t die for ages.’ So she doesn’t have to worry about it yet, she says. ‘Tell me,’ she says, when we cuddle down together at night, ‘about when you were little.’ She likes the ones about my naughty brother best. And when I forgot my little sister. And Benedict cutting Gemma’s fringe when he was three. Edward is two, he’s highly-sprung—he can bounce like a circus acrobat—and he knows that he’s funny. He’s worked out how to undo the child-locks on the cupboards but he always conscientiously does them up again. He sobs on leaving the cable car after his first return trip: he’s pushed the button like Max used to, and waved to the people in the other car. Again! Again! He puts his arms round our knees and squeezes; he says NO and throws himself face down on the sofa; and he likes Dogger and Thomas the Tank Engine and Bob the Builder but the person he admires most in the world is his sister, especially when she’s bad.
In Wellington we have Gemma and Joe; we never quite know when Auckland with its moist warm air, its self-confident gloss, will lure them back, as it already has with Lucie who, if you take your coffee in Ponsonby, is probably your barista. Her lovely face is Renaissance tranquil; well named, she brings light into any room. She reads—she reads! And we still like talking about flings. And Max who’s 15, floppy-haired, suddenly tall, just the right amount of angst, is happiest when his friends with the trumpet and the cello are round at his place, him on the drums or the keyboard, the three of them making music. At Robert’s seventieth birthday in March, Lucie and Max sit side by side on the outdoor sofa in the sun, arguing about who will—should—lead the Democrats into the next election. Then Max sits on the steps coming down to our house and, with apparently unintentional cruelty, plays on his friend’s borrowed trumpet, for the Tennis Team—a bunch of craggy old codgers—The Last Post.
We have our grand-puppy, a red border collie, Sunny, who knows that I’m a pushover.
Don’t need to be homesick. Am home.
LINDA BURGESS is the author of three novels, three non-fiction titles and one collection of short stories. She is a monthly television reviewer on Radio New Zealand on Afternoons with Jesse Mulligan, and was a television and film reviewer at The Dominion Post for several years. She has won several literary awards and has been a judge for a number of our national awards. Linda was a finalist in the Voyager Media Awards 2019 with her essay ‘We’d be called WAGs now’. She lives in Wellington.
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