Time and Place by Marion Pountney Baird

Inside I was a country girl with different experiences. 

Still locked into a world I had left behind.

Something needed to be put in place. 

Something needed to be laid to rest.

The scene was drawing closer to me as we turned off the main road into Murupara, into Kopuriki Road, which looked largely unchanged - the scatter of tumbledown houses, displays of vehicles and the odd horse grassing in untidy paddocks.

I recalled the number of times we had travelled this road, windows wound shut to keep out the billows of thick dust.  It was now sealed and white Sky discs sat on roof tops. As we rounded a corner the view of the valley opened up and I was struck with a wave of emotion – I became silent and focused as in a meditation – a sweep of yellow poplars against the blue expanse of sky and beyond that the towering blue Urewera ranges. I had a surreal feeling of reaching the familiar, of coming home.

When I recognised the flat ground used as an air field for top dressing planes I knew we were nearly there. Past the turn off to Carson’s pumice road, and the wattle trees around our place came into view. The gate entrance, with the worn drive-in bay for rural delivery, the letter box, now aluminium, with the house beyond, was so compelling - entry into a previous time, a place experienced so many years ago that yet felt so present.

As I stood at the farm gate I felt that everything I else had done, and the places I had visited around the world, were stripped away. I was returning to where I had played, explored, collected the bread from the letter box, plucking and devouring its soft belly underneath the paper wrapper, waited for the school bus, biked on the worn smooth lines between the gravel, made bracken huts and swum in the river that formed such a big part of farm life; endless memories etched and later realised. I needed to walk on the land again and take in the reason for my return.

The boys waited in the car, sensing this was my time; and for this moment their presence receded.  Richie took photos of the gate in between my well of tears and expressions of: “I’m nearly fifty and I’ve been all around the world and here I am – this is where I’ve come back to…”

I was connected so much with this place, I actually belonged here, my place of origin. This was our foundation place.

I walked down the sweeping earth driveway that was still dotted with silver birches, with the familiar wooden animal-proof surrounds.

Our house, set well back from the road and built by local builders, was different from many of the government designs that were part of the Galatea valley post-war settlement. We had a tiled roof and a veranda with French doors opening out from the bedrooms and kept open on hot summer nights.

In winter the puddles froze over along the drive and the spider webs on the fences became white sparkling jewels. The school bus was a frozen empty chamber – as the first on, we blew portholes in the ‘white-out’ windows with our warm breath. The pumice banks beside the shady side of the road often stayed expanded with icy crystals on our return in the afternoon. At the gate was a large wooden letter box for pick-ups and deliveries. We stood on the other side for the bus. Waiting in the silence we put our ears to the telephone pole to hear the hum, imagining conversations on the party line.

A warm, open-faced woman of around forty came out of the house, which was now extended with large brown aluminium window frames. 

“I grew up here, a long time ago. I’m doing a return visit. My parents owned this farm originally, the Pountneys. My Uncle Phil had the neighbouring farm. Is it OK if I walk around for a bit? My family, husband and boys, are waiting in the car …”

She looked at me, and perhaps the emotion still showed on my face or she intuitively sensed the significance of my pilgrimage.

“Sure you can. Everyone knows this as the Pountney farm. My sister and her family farm here now. I’m visiting too. I love coming back to the valley. You do what you need to do. Family need to realise that mothers have needs. If mother is not happy then no one is happy.”

I was grateful for her affirmation and our conversation tapered off.

The garage was gone. The rickety frame of the wooden gate that had led into the woodshed paddock was the only remnants of the original fence.

I walked out beyond that to the ridge of land that dropped down to what was left of the stand of fruit trees. Only two trees remained. Beyond that the landscape was changed beyond recognition; the flats in front of the river now under water and part of the lake formed when the dam was put in, in the late 70s.

But nothing deterred me from the connection I felt in being there. Perhaps I felt everything at once; the memories of this as my home, the world I had shared and explored so intimately with my sisters, the home I didn’t want to leave as an eleven year old, the loss of place, the grief of leaving, the isolation and loneliness I had experienced at home prior to our departure.

Perhaps I was also grieving for an end of childhood?

I would have been around ten years old. My sisters were at school in Rotorua, boarding during the week and coming home at weekends. As the youngest I was the only child left at home with my parents. I was walking alone where I was now, after school, late afternoon, in autumn, caught between seasons and endings, feeling the farm’s emptiness, even its ugliness, as if everything special was gone.

We left in July 1967, the month of decimal currency. I remember asking Mum if I could stay on at Nana’s down the road and finish primary school instead of going to Rotorua. I was disappointed with her reply.

“Of course not. Don’t be so silly.”

To me it was an innovative solution to my dilemma. It is interesting that staying on in the place and the school was a stronger desire than moving into Rotorua with my family.

On another occasion Mum and Dad were away, my sisters were at High School and Nana came to stay at the house. I had been unwell and away from school and the only one at home. I lay in bed listening to the days and nights of heavy rain on the roof that meant one thing:  flooding. It came up overnight and Uncle Phil had no time to move the stock off the flats. They were either marooned on grass islands or swept away, their bleating cries could be heard over the roar of the racing brown water.

I remember going into his house seeing him seated in the kitchen table with his head in his hands sobbing – it was the first time I had seen or heard of a man crying. The school bus couldn’t get through so I had to stay at home with the same feeling of loneliness and powerless that things were coming to an end.

When the school bus came back on, I feigned sickness and stayed at home longer than I needed to, caught by emptiness.

Being here in this moment between worlds I was overwhelmed. My second outpouring of grief was unrestrained as I stood on the green pasture in the sunshine, my blue knit top matching the sky. I clicked my camera to find I had taken the last shot and the film now wound noisily in its case to the end.

I walked briefly towards the cow shed past the stand of macrocarpa, uncertain of how long had passed, and hesitated.  I remembered the waiting passengers and weighed up any need to spend more time here.  Spotting a figure in the cowshed I suddenly felt like a trespasser, and decided I was satisfied with my moment.

I turned toward the road and walked across the paddock, down the driveway to the car, surprised to find the boys absorbed in their books. It felt good to be accommodated in this brief but significant moment of time and place.

I took in the view I had woken to, that had been ever present – the background mountains, the land I walked on, the expanse of sky. The all-pervasive silence endured.