The Bay in Me - by Cynthia Matthews
This is not my story of how I come to be in the Bay of Plenty, but rather how the Bay comes to be in me.
Around a century ago my grandfather came north. He fell for the Bay and it was an attachment that stayed for the rest of his life. From the building of the firm he founded and from a street sign his name still lives amongst the businesses and the bustle of the town, and up on the hill it still presides over the many trees he planted and nurtured. And there’s another name on the war cenotaph, that of the son he never forgot.
This became my grandfather’s place. He has never left. On clear mornings it is now the turn of the blue hills of the Waioeka to look out over his bones while the river surges close by as it washes the feet of the town gardens on its way to the bar.
I saw my grandfather entirely through the eyes of a child. It’s a portrait pieced together with the fragile glue of family rememberings overlaid with small chips of information. Like all things made of memory, it’s personal, incomplete and probably coloured by sentiment.
We visited every summer holidays. Days started with the milkman clattering at the front gate, the grocer and the butcher at the kitchen door while the mynahs squabbled over the pipi shells in the back yard. My grandfather was the deep brown as a berry figure – this was before people talked about the frailties of the ozone layer – hoeing the vegetable garden while we were still eating our porridge. He would have been up hours before to take advantage of the sun being still mild enough to work in.
He probably did much of his thinking outside. Although well-disposed to his grandchildren, his sustaining interest was in things green and growing. Greetings to him when so engaged always met the same old joke: “Merry Christmas, – !” (the name of whoever the child was that was hailing him). The hoe kept tilling or the spade digging.
It was a reminder to us children that we could and should entertain ourselves. For an eight-year-old, there was a plethora of discoveries to investigate. How had the huts fared that we had made last year in the shady old natives along the front lawn? What was the latest craze my friend Tom, across the road, was presently absorbed in? How many green plums could you eat before you really did get that tummy ache we were warned about? Was the bulldog still on Wellington Street that gruffed at you on the way back from the Blue Moon eating ice-cream?
I never asked my grandfather about his parents or his earlier life. Later on I found out that he was brought up in the Hawke’s Bay. His mother came from Ireland. She was a horsewoman and had bloodstock shipped out to New Zealand. After he finished university in Christchurch (where his own grandfather settled, in a house still lived in on the shores of another eastern bay) he came north again.
As a young man in my mother’s sepia photograph of him, my grandfather appeared strikingly handsome. Now, having journeyed past middle age, he was the man we left in the garden on our way to the beach: tall, bare midriff above loose old shorts (he kept in pretty good shape and was fit), tufty hair that appeared very white against his tan.
It felt almost peculiar to see my grandfather indoors. He used a bedroom as a sort of office where he worked during the hotter part of the day. The room housed intriguing objects that friends and past clients had given him: a collection of adzes, a stone pounder, a green glass lamp. The shelves reached to the ceiling with old books with titles that seemed mysterious and difficult to pronounce, and was crammed with copies of ancient newspapers, the National Geographic and botanical magazines.
His huge interest in botany stayed throughout his life and it was here, looking out to the intimate back lawn and its beds of bright lilies, that he corresponded with colleagues from around the country and the world. He wrote in black ink in a sprawling elongated copperplate. Later I found out that he was fluent in Māori and that he had set out to learn Te Reo after his arrival in the Bay.
My grandfather’s room, sequestered at the cooler side of the house, smelt of oiled wood furniture and dusty histories that seeped from the regal tomes within the bookshelf. It was his domain, just as outside the vegetable garden, the many pots of natives on every porch and the rampant, extensive orchard were his also. My grandmother took care of the flower garden.
My grandfather’s efforts and the Bay’s warm climate produced trusses of sun-ripened tomatoes, barrows of corn and cucumber, boxes of beans. The orchard held a brawny Chinese gooseberry vine that no one paid much attention to. This was before the kiwi fruit export phenomenon. Mum always took home a carton of persimmons carefully packed in newspaper and we gorged on apples and peaches.
Too soon it would be time for us to reluctantly pile into the car for the long journey home. I envied my friend Tom who stayed in the Bay all year around. But in saying goodbye I never doubted that my grandfather would be there the next year. He drank a glass of olive oil every day and told us it kept him healthy. We believed him. Wasn’t this the man who still climbed mountains and had been hale all his life? In leaving, despite already thinking about how our next visit was unimaginably distant, we’d also be pragmatic in the knowledge that our grandfather would keep everything in good heart until we returned. On his behalf, he’d give a short wave and a grin. The garden would be calling.
