Rightly or wrongly, Mum had very firm opinions about her two brothers. Uncle Ian could do no wrong — and I do bear his name. However he was farming in Tauranga long before Dorothy and Cliff had us kids, so we had nothing to do with him. On the other hand she didn’t think much of Uncle Don. I have no idea why. For one thing, she and Dad never told us, and for another we left Taipuha when I was seven. The little I do remember of Uncle Don is from when he was much older, at a McCarroll reunion. Heather and I were well into marriage by then, and he was perfectly amiable and engaging.
Bad blood or not, while we were still at Taipuha I used to walk to Uncle Don and Auntie Hilda’s to play with my cousin Brian, and I can’t remember any resistance or negativity from my parents. Their house was a couple of hundred yards down the road from where we lived, up a short, gravelled, steep (in my memory) driveway above the road. A macropcarpa hedge surrounded the garden, which Hilda was still working on in her 80s. A gateway out the back. The usual dogs and sheds.
I remember two incidents in particular: walking up the drive to see Brian’s two sisters washing the car in their bra and pants (no teenage girls in our house) and Brian and I playing cowboys and Indians — me the cowboy with a toy pistol, him the Indian with a real tomahawk. He whacked me across the bridge of the nose with it. There was a reasonable amount of blood and crying, and a satisfying scar.
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Taipuha and her family were important to Mum for as long as she lived. We took her to Taipuha for her 78th birthday, in March 1999. For a few weeks she hadn’t spoken a word, but it was a very pleasant occasion around the table in Hilda’s kitchen. Don had died the year before. There were those little indications that the world was changing: I’d baked a sponge cake — not as good as Mum’s — and Brian had baked bread, with no diminished sense of our manhood. Hilda showed us around her garden and said she hoped she’d be able to finish it before she too passed away. She lived to 101 so she had every chance.
Heather and I had picked up Dorothy in Whangarei to take her to Taipuha. She was sitting in the front seat, Heather in the back, me driving. Heather and I talked to each other as we drove — and we drove right past the Paparoa turnoff. Pre Google, and with no book of maps, we got lost. We must have driven through Tauraroa and Waiotira, I don’t know.
We drew up to an intersection and I stopped. “I don’t know whether to turn right or left”, I said.
“Turn left,” said Mum. They were the last words I heard her say.
She died three months later.
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Proving that this is indeed “work in progress”, as the strap-line says, I don’t have much to say right now about Don and Ian — as I write this I haven’t even addressed their parents — but Dorothy did write a beautiful account of her childhood.
When Mum died Ian added a little third party perspective to her stories, and their upbringing in Woodhill and Taipuha.