My First Sixteen Years lloyd gretton

The End of my Childhood

Puss in Boots marked also the end of my childhood. I had turned fourteen. While still recovering from the enervating effects of the show and nearly prostrated with another bout of eye trouble, I noticed curious changes over my body.

I was so innocent, it had never before crossed my mind that I must inherit a man's body and man's sexual feelings. Now I discovered there was a twilight time when one crossed from the one age to the other. My body was leading me remorselessly across that border. I was on edge and profoundly unhappy. I cried easily to my intense annoyance.

Since early childhood I had read in books about sexual feelings. I had thought Apollo had the hots for the nymphs as our bantam roosters had them for their hens. When a little older I had read Nikos Kazantzakis, I had imagined both the author and his hot-blooded characters were depraved by an evil (even insane) instinct. I had once told a Makaraka Pakeha classmate my startling discovery that a woman could give birth without been married. He could not believe it, but Arthur smiled knowingly.

The Summer holiday flew by where once they had seemed an age.
It was term time "4L 1968". Our class came back, and we were all bigger and a bit ungainly except for Hugh, who was a delightful twelve year old.
Years later, I found out that the Lytton teachers spoke of "3L 1967" with something close to awe. They were still meditating how that class had depths and talents unexpected among the ranks of children. I was surprised. I thought we were tearaways. In 1968 we were encumbered with more bodily less spiritual concerns.

Iremained in the violin class, but dropped out of the drama class. The Gisborne Theatre people found this incomprehensible. But I was tired and disenchanted with the bubble and stress of the limelight. I also abandoned Mrs Taylor. The city had heard rumours of her bohemian lifestyle, and mercilessly derided her. She left her husband, and set up a live-in elocution studio with her ‘sister’. When I had failed to shine in elocution competitions, her promises that I would find thespian fame in London faded away. Her attention wandered in my presence, and my course of study became fitful. I imbibed the normal prejudice that public elocution was for girls and effeminate boys.

I had become disenchanted with the exhausting bike rides to Gisborne from the orchard to attend my club activities. When we children were reluctant to work on the orchard, Dad would entice us with the horrific thought of that little house in a Gisborne back street. How I yearned for that little house.

My school academic results continued their spiralling catastrophic descent. The teachers by and large left me in my little hole. Two 1968 encounters with teachers in the classroom stay vivid. One was maths with Mr Hender. Mr Hender was displeased with the class term results.

Niccola only eighty three per cent
– these results from my class mates are apocryphal – 
An appalling result. Barry, seventy two. Maybe a few strokes of the cane would make a difference. I was however very pleased with Lloyd's result.

I was startled out of my reverie. I now saw that Mr Hender was looking at me.

Last term he got 3 per cent. This term he got 10 per cent. That is an improvement of over three hundred per cent. No one in the class got anywhere near that result. Lloyd is an example to us all.

There was laughter from the boys, and congratulations from the girls. I smiled wanly. Indeed, my result was a surprise. The last part of the exam required a diagram. I had strangely remembered it on the blackboard a week before. I got ten out of ten for it.

Mr Hender may have just attended a teacher's seminar on boosting self-esteem in dim pupils instead of low sarcasim in the classroom.

I mentioned Nicola. I am sure she had no idea. But in the 4 latin class, I was obsessed with her. Once I said something intelligent in the classroom, and she turned round and looked at me. The room seemed to spin, and I felt hot and cold thrills pass through me. I was much too shy to approach her, and had no doubt she just thought me a funny kid. I imagined that Nicola looked like Mum must have looked as a young girl in the bloom of health and youth. In a cruel twist, there was another very sweet girl, Wendy, who was obsessed about me. She conversely was publicly shameless about it. She pleaded with me to take her out to the Gisborne A & P Show. This created much amusement in the class. I feigned I was as cold as ice.

My other memorable encounter with a teacher was with the arts teacher, Mr Bugden. He was a family friend, and had so far been kind to me. We had to complete a cut and paste mosaic art work. I was quietly happy. Each art lesson, I dreamed with my scissors and my paint brush. Suddenly, Mr Bugden was in front of me.

Right, Lloyd, that's enough.

The class immediately went deathly silent.

Everyone else is on the second art work. Some have even started on the third. And you are still uncompleted! I can't take your painting anymore! Take it out of my sight! Just get rid of it! I am fed up to the back teeth with it! Take it home and show your parents. Clearly, you have a problem.

As we gathered at the door at the end of class, Hugh was astonished to see me in a distraught state, but alas it was laughter.

The school library was renovated that year. Anonymous donated a selection of Penguin Translations of Greek and Roman Classics. No one else in the school appeared to notice their existence. I took one browse and was hooked.
I was already familiar with Gilbert Murray's translations of Greek tragedies in the Gisborne library. I had come to them via the seduction of Mary Renault's Mask of Apollo. The coast and my family faded to my shadow lands. They were just stale repeats of yesteryear.
Those male Hellenes, idealistic yet worldly wise also, cool yet passionate, were my heroes. The ancient cities became magic talismans to me.

When we went picnicking up the Coast, I scarcely registered with the dry bush and tracks. I was reading and day dreaming Herodotus' narrative of the reed boats and their cargoes of men, casks of wine, and asses sailing down the Euphrates river to mud-baked, bronze and golden Babylon. Once I saw that a girl in my class was reading a Mary Renault ancient history novel. I was disquieted and angry. Ancient history was my private space where no one else could intrude on my expert knowledge.

I recall once telling Mum about Pericles' eulogy on the spirit of Athens. I am sure my tones were awed.

I may have quoted,
Famous men have the whole earth as their memorial.

Mum suddenly said,
What about me? What can be my reason for life?

That startled me. My idealised world was entirely masculine and clothed in Classical cloaks. Then I brightened.

I know your reason for life. You can be my ink blotter.

I could not understand that she looked distressed. I would have not quoted Pericles' parting shot,

The greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men, whether they are praising you or criticising you.

I simply did not register when my classical heroes were putting the boot into women, slaves and barbarians.

Mum at this time had acquired a soul-mate. When I first met her in our car, her novelty intrigued me. Mum was driving our car. She sat beside Mum, and smoked with the furious intensity of a factory chimney. She was starkly thin with blood shot eyes. Gisborne back streets' life spewed out of her sooty mouth and croaky voice box. Acidic comments mixed copiously with kindnesses. Mum, who had become remote from the world, listened to it all with incredible intensity. As I had Pericles, Mum seemed to have Mrs Johnson. She came over to the orchard for a few days to look after my sisters, while we older ones attended cousin Lindsay's twenty first. The girls liked her and her retarded daughter a lot. Dad later made a few acerbic remarks about Mrs Johnson sleeping in his bed.

Another person to now become important in our household was our Minister, Reverend Keal. When he came round, there were long conferences in the sitting room with him and my parents. We children were excluded. But they never thought the dish washer in the adjoining kitchen was intently listening. One comment of Mum's stuck in my mind. She wished she were Boudecea in her chariot.

This running my ear into confidential conversations when everyone had forgotten my existence was an old habit. When Nan and Mum's sister Aunty Joy agreed they would like to knock my parents' heads together for letting Paul leave school without School Certificate, I carefully relayed that back to Gisborne.

Aunty Joy deserves a footnote. She was totally lacking in any imaginative skills, but had extraordinary dramatic powers of reconstructing her own soap opera life. In my childhood, when at night I heard her loud voice, I used to slip out of bed and snuggle behind the sitting room door. There I would listen with great enthralment to her stories about her alcoholic husband and her delinquent stepson, also a Lloyd. Dad and Mum were always full of helpful advice. That also helped to boost my self esteem that I was the good Lloyd. The other Lloyd was good natured and jocularly led on his stepmother mercilessly.

Mr Keal took my bible class group. We learnt from him that the miracles were literary contrivances to instruct the ignorant. Jesus was just a good man. Mr Keal even once hinted Jesus might be classed as insane. None of our Minister's words were really a shock or contested by our class. Our upbringing and education must have slipped us all into liberal Christianity. The Geering heresy trial had recently occurred. I recall its media reports were the main news and caused intense interest among adults.

Mr Keal's sermons and his personal qualities gave him high standing in the district. The historic Matawhero Church was filled up every Sunday with country people drinking in his erudite moral lessons. I recall Mr Keal in the Church in resplendent robes proclaiming the mediaeval holy sacrament. He did it magnificently. At our bible classes, he told us quietly he would like to throw the whole pomp out and bring in guitars. His wife, Grenda, was what was then called a blue stocking. She played the expected shadow to her husband, but some women wondered if she wrote most of her husband's sermons. Mr Keal was true to his word to youth. In later years, he reinvented himself as a social worker for the motorcycle gangs. Grenda died of a brain tumour.

The Geering heresy trial caused dissension and trauma in the parish. Mr Keal was an eloquent Geering supporter. The head of the Sunday school was the advocate for the conservative Church.

Then everything I have taught the children is a lie! she snapped back to Mr Keal.

The Keals left the parish soon after, church attendance dwindled to old faithfuls, the pentecosts came in, the husband of the Sunday school teacher shot himself. Mr Keal's Church organist died of a brain tumour. Her son was my Sunday school teacher who cut the fence of the Gisborne rugby grounds. Her husband married our neighbour Pat and died some short years later of a heart attack.

Now that I found out that Jesus was just a good man, I found another spiritual hero. He was a Greek pagan, Oedipus. He had been decently exiled from children's Greek mythology books. So my discovery had the flush of the mysterious unknown. I found in the Gisborne library, the novel Oedipus by Henry Treece. On recent examination, I found the novel overwrought. Then it shook me weirdly. It was perhaps not an appropriate book for a fourteen year old. I had a series of very disturbing dreams.

One evening I watched (with shame faced curiosity), Fleur make love to her husband so they could have a baby. Those were the days of television drama productions in black and white without the staggering intrusions of promos and advertising. You then could have transcending moments in front of a flickering black & white T.V. set. If I would list my half dozen favourite childhood experiences, watching transcending uninterrupted television would be among them!

Today one cannot go out in the sun without a tug of fear about cancer. One cannot tramp the land without an anxiety about offending Maori spiritual sites or being shot by a property owner's gun. Those childhood pleasures lost today cannot be restored. But another childhood pleasure, uninterrupted, quality prime-time television, lies within all of our easy grasp. I have some doubts the suits in television are now even normal functioning human beings. I think they are more likely junk merchants and shit heads.

The year of 1968 has now been given the accolade of a wonder year. In our back water, only the media reminded us that anything odd was going on. The Vietnam war was in its full horror. The hippies fascinated and repelled us.

We became enamoured with the Bobby Kennedy Presidential Campaign. I had just completed the Robert Graves' Claudius books. The books' Emperor and Senators had an ancient glorious resonance for me. Washington politics inherited the grandeur and the tragedies of ancient Rome.

The President held the aura of a stricken Emperor. Bobby Kennedy, William Fullbright, even Hubert Humphrey spoke – in Humphrey's case spat – with the cadences and eloquence of Roman Senators. At school, I sang the Bob Dylan song with fervour:

Come Senators, Come Congressmen,
Please Heed The Call,
For The Times They Are A Changin'

The media in those days did little to discourage this perception of imperial Washington.
My first disillusionment came about when an American man with a goofy grin told a cheering audience,

Yes, America has problems, but there is no time that I would prefer living in the United States than in 1968

My parents scorned a new name, Tricky Dick.

Claudius ranked almost with Oedipus for my affections. I never thought they were heroes. Cripples both, they stumbled and blundered their way to win a great city and outwit their critics. Then fate and a wily woman ruined them. Some part of me below my rational thought must have identified with them.

One pleasant evening, I went alone to the movies to see The Taming Of The Shrew. It was after my violin lesson. The bawdy movie I greatly enjoyed. It was however marred by an elderly Maori man who farted loudly and good humouredly. Mum picked me up at the end of the movie. As she was driving me home, she said suddenly,

I have some very bad news about a person very important to you.

I immediately thought it was Maurice. In my usual evasive way, I asked her not to tell me. When she said,

Bobby Kennedy has been shot in the leg!

My first response was relief. Then she said,

There are people out to get the Kennedys.

When we got back home, we listened to the late night television news. Senator Kennedy had been shot in the head. There were no pictures, but there was a sound tape of a middle aged voice speaking that she had seen and heard a young woman in a red polka‑dot dress call out excitedly that they had shot Kennedy. It was all very surrealistic. That was the last any of us heard about the lady in the red polka‑dot dress.

I talked obsessively about the Kennedys for several weeks after that shooting until people objected. The last moments of Bobby Kennedy still send a tug of sorrow to me. He had been that magic age, early forties, when political leaders are middle-aged to their families and subordinates, but adolescents to their young followers.

The year of 1968 drew to a close. My academic results had been calamitous again.
I remained bottom of the class every term except one, when a girl had to abandon a test because she was unwell. I had still not heard of periods.

But outside that, I remained a bright boy. I often took the lead in class discussions in language subjects. I sat beside Maurice. We often conversed alone in the play ground. He had three obsessions, his classical music, his problematic father, and his sick leg. I could empathise with the first two. The music I had an inside knowledge of since infancy, via Mum's old record player and vinyl records. I had found out malpractice at the Gisborne hospital had turned a simple bone break into near fatal gangrene.

We played our violins together in the club. I think I was reasonably popular with my classmates. I regularly played with the boys at play time. To some surprise, I represented my class for 1967 and 1968 in the school relay race.

1968 was the centenary of the 1868 Matawhero Massacre. There was some publicity in the Gisborne Herald. Mum brought from the Gisborne library a book by an old pioneer. Moments before our family tea time, I glanced at the book. I was suddenly transported two miles away and a hundred years back. Angry young brown men were shooting with muskets through our door. Now when everyone else in my family was asleep, I lay awake in the boys' hut and trembled at the slightest night noise. Te Kooti's memory lay over Poverty Bay as an unimaginable event to the Pakehas. A shiver in an awakening hour perhaps, but too strange to dream about. Our Maoris were good sorts. A bit too prone on the beer, but the best workers and completely apolitical.

The school break up night also commemorated the departure of the head master, Mr Wilson. That night had an awful poignancy. Mr and Mrs Wilson congratulated the winner of The Fraser Wilson Memorial Cup. That commemorated their own teenage son, killed in a car accident a few months earlier. He had graduated from the school the year before. At the time of the funeral, the pupils around me had seemed callous. Mr Wilson was not popular with the pupils. To us Mr Wilson was a martinet, always badgering us about our uniforms, our hair and imminent School Certificate. I had grown up in Gisborne with Dad's boss' son. Like his dad, Fraser had joined the navy. He was hitch hiking from Devonport back to Gisborne when he and his navy friend got in the wrong car. All three were killed.

When Dad stopped on the road to pick up my violin case – I was cycling home from a violin club practice – he told me. He was returning from offering condolences. I could only stare speechless and almost fainting at him. When I got back on my bike, I recalled the war dead of Athens and the Gettysburg dead soldiers. Their deaths had been immortalised in famous paeans to democracy by Pericles and Lincoln. Sudden violent death of young vigorous men had suddenly hit home. War no longer seemed to me a glorious affair.

The Fraser Wilson Memorial Cup was awarded for the old fashioned values of honesty, diligence, and duty. The applause was thunderous and long. Every adult seemed to be sharing a secret nightmare. Cars in the hands of children was a very recent phenomenon. There was also a feeling of guilt in the applause. The winner was a Maori boy.

Before I conclude 1968, I shall refer to two further issues. We boys lay under the shadow of the cane. The girls were spared that painful indignity. That made them more mischievous. But being sent to the senior mistress seemed to arouse a superstitious terror that far out distanced mere painful strokes. Except for two teachers, this special prerogative was not often abused by the male teachers. These two abusers seemed to regard wielding the cane as a great joke. That was a comedy that we boys did not share.

One afternoon after school hours, one of the abusers ordered Barry to bend over the cloakroom table. He delivered several switches while we classmates stared in witless astonishment. Barry's penalty was he was talking boisterously, and was a smart boy when admonished. After the teacher had gone, Barry laughed, and then gripped his buttocks in agony. I thought it funny much later.

Another time was at soft ball practice. The same abuser made a jest to a boy, the boy responded with a swift riposte that left the teacher speechless. He was sent away to the office and told to put on his thick pants.

Whenever I follow the New Zealand Parliament, I recall that atrocity. We New Zealand adults have had the skill of repartee thrashed out of us in our youth by both our peers and adults. When verbally ambushed, we now have no honed verbal assault weapon. All we have is low sarcasm and a mean brooding mood.

The other cane abuser had the joke thrown back at him. After school, he used to have a line of boys waiting for the stick outside the office. I used to hear it all inside Dad's book room next door. Then to my delight, a delinquent boy refused to bend over the chair. There was much consternation. I thought the sky would fall. To my complete astonishment, the teachers all collapsed like popped cushions. This third form delinquent was the only pupil who knew the teachers could not wield the cane like masters of the universe.

The rod or the strap has loomed gigantically over my generation's upbringing. Having hanged the Nazi and Japanese leaders, our parents' generation were rarely squeamish in dishing out physical punishment to their own little barbarians. Dad uplifted his strap from Hicks Bay School for discipline at Manutuke until Scott and I buried it in the orchard. It took a Thompson cousin to give us the gall. The upbringing of our sisters made Dad benign.

A New Zealand poet has described hearing the perennial screams of punished children as he did his paper run through the suburbs in the post-war years. Now the tables have turned. Society has stigmatised a good hiding as abuse. Old guys are dragged before the courts for decades-old abuse cases. They are always sexual cases, but I suspect there is a subliminal anger directed at the parental tyrants of yesteryear. Today in the schools, the bodies of the children are taboo. That is a sort of progress.

But a talk by an internationally famous New Zealand children's author has made me suspect my generation is no more listening to the small voiceless among us than earlier generations. She described leaving her daughter sick with measles inside her parked car all day while she did her day job. The adult writers and readers audience found that extraordinarily amusing.

Ohe second issue in 1968 was the Fourth Form boys' tramping trip. I volunteered to join with most of the boys. Maurice was excluded by his leg. One boy was keen to join. But he was the one to get the hard word of rejection. The previous year at a school show, he had appeared in drag in a cabaret. That was apparently tolerated. But now the mean spirited had their revenge. I have been told that boy in manhood committed suicide to avoid the ravages of AIDS.

We tramped from Lytton to the Wairere domain. That was an all day excursion. We put up our tents. In the evening, the accompanying teachers paid a courtesy call to the local farmer. Left to our own devices, homosexual hanky-panky went rampant. We all rushed to our tents when word came that the teachers were returning. The next morning, I was confidently told that in the neighbouring tent a small boy was stripped all night by two hulking companions.

1969 was my Fifth Form year. Our latin class was disbanded, and latin became an option. Our latin teacher, Mrs Megan, kindly allowed me to join the Fifth Form latin class despite my farcical marks. Maurice, Hugh, Wendy and a few others of the academic elite made up the latin class.

I blush now at my effrontery at joining them. I studied latin texts on my own, and sometimes I caught a ray of illumination. I still didn't have a clue about the grammar. The others sailed off into its deep waters. At least I did not hold them back.

I had been encouraged in the final term of 1968 to revise my school books after an inspirational act by Mum. She had written to the Classicist, Professor Blakelock, about my reading subjects. The Professor had grandly replied that I could have a career as an ancient history historian.

I immediately saw a starry sky in my future instead of the disaster predicted by my class mates. I wrote a piece about my hero, Pericles, and Mum posted it to him. He sent back a copy of a lecture delivered by him to some conference. Mum was overawed with his erudition and literary style. I succeeded in reading it, and found it inspiringly terrifying. The Professor evoked the Roman general who ordered his soldiers to destroy Carthage. The general had personally opposed the war, and now lamented the human waste and the inevitable likewise fate of Rome.

Years before, I had read in Nan's flat about the destruction of Carthage. But I had read and imagined it from the perspective of the Carthaginians. The Professor concluded with homilies about your duty to your country, and the progress of history. The Nazi guard with his gun trained on the Jewish boy in the Life photograph might have been thinking similar thoughts as the general and the Professor.

One part of me, my education, was with the Professor. My heartfelt natural sympathies have always been with the Levantines when they have been invaded by blond beasts with the syndrome of the master race. I had, after all, experienced that personally all my life.

Professor Blakelock wrote that to succeed I had to pursue disciplined studies! I have heard that the Professor led the public outcry against the play-way in education. It perhaps had never crossed his mind that one could pursue the classics as a play-way.

I only once disrupted the class in Fifth Form latin. It was late afternoon class, and Lloyd was mysteriously missing. Wendy became concerned. Mrs Megan sent the boys out to look for Lloyd. They found him wondering alone in the school quad. They stealthily approached him. He looked up and innocently asked,

Is it Biology now?

They seized him, and frog‑marched him to latin.

In my fifteenth year I was relapsing into serious absent‑mindedness. The gathering load of academic disasters was becoming more than I could bear. No one else seemed bothered about it. I had discovered a simple solution of wishing it all away. The school hummed around me, and I lulled myself into a vaguely contented reverie. During the day, my mind was starved of intellectual stimulus. So at night once everyone else was asleep, I took out my next book, and entered its world into the early hours of the morning. But the day hours found me a physical wreck. I had discovered a new cave of treasures, epic poems. In each national epic, I entered the spirit and deeds of another people and culture.

I was already well honed for these intellectual adventures. In 1968, I had read most of the King James Bible. I had skipped The Prophets and the Song of Solomon. Paul was most alarmed that I would be turning into a bible basher. But Mum sanguinely assured him I was reading it for the history.

Memories of the 1967 Arab‑Israeli War were still fresh. The media had been great champions of the Israelis and great scorners of the Arabs. Any dissenting voices that the Arabs weren't just a mob of envious and blood-thirsty tent dwellers had been extraordinarily silenced. My parents were such fervent champions of the Israeli war effort, it was as if they shared a blood bond with their young fighting men.

I didn't know it at the time, but that was a widespread impulse among Jewish households throughout the Western world. The Holocaust had so demeaned us, everywhere the Western hegemony was in retreat, Vietnam spluttered on ignominiously. Now this brave little nation had unexpectedly done what the great Western nations could no longer do – rout the natives.

I read the bible with Protestant eyes. I revisited the eloquent cadences of the King James version. The exalted sense of special union with God and the grand passions in the biblical lands filled my cup of joy and awe again. When Aunty Doris at Hicks Bay had quoted to us from the King James version, I believed these were the actual words of God and his chosen people. The ancient Israelites were the precursors of the modern Israeli war machine. Both had been endowed and protected by God Himself.

I ordered from a Wellington library, a three volume text of the Hindu epic, The Ramayana. Since childhood, I had been familiar with the story of Rama and Sita. I was conscious I was reading not just fairy tales but a great novelistic story. I knew the deeds of these Indian heroes were rooted in the Hindu religion. The exotic lands of India entranced me again.

Having completed The Ramayana, I ordered from the Wellington library the Hindu epic, The Mahabrahata. Two enormous volumes arrived in faded tiny print. I was both delighted and alarmed to find out they were the first two of ten volumes! I took the first volume to school.

It is only the first volume of the poem, there are ten volumes, I said nonchalantly to Hugh.

Hugh, struggling under its weight, rushed it over to Maurice.

It's a poem and there are ten volumes! he gasped.

The Mahabrahata lost me in a sea of words. My chronic eye trouble was threatening to disable me. To my great relief, Dad sent it back.

In the legend of Rama, the infant Rama in his cradle had tried to play with the moon. In 1969 we all believed in the Apollo 11 moon landing because we all believed everything our governments told us. Since their genesis, the space voyages had enthralled us. Outer Space was magic, and its astronauts were its wizards. When the Russians put women into space, Mum told me their women could manage it because they were big chested and masculine. When Neil Armstrong spoke his immortal words, we listened to him in the school grounds from transistor radios, and looked up wonderingly to the pale tiny moon in the bright cloudless sky.

On my sixteenth birthday, Mum presented me with the Mesopotamian epic, The Epic of Gilgamesh. My joy, C.S. Lewis' definition of joy, was complete. I wanted to talk to Mum all the rest of the evening about Gilgamesh and other heroes. But Mrs Johnson was sick in hospital, and waiting for Mum's regular visit. I spent my diminished joy in completing reading the epic.

Gilgamesh was an authentic hero for the late nineteen sixties. He sought immortality in his charisma, and he sought happiness in superhuman conquests. But he found out mortality was the universal fate on earth, and happiness were the transcending brief moments of contentment. I have re‑read a modern translation of the epic, and recommend it as required reading for all makers of systems and bearers of old grudges.

As the Sumerian Noah counselled Gilgamesh:

Do we build a house to stand for ever?
Are contracts sealed for ever?
Do brothers divide their inheritance to last for ever?
Does hatred remain in the heart for ever?

The poet priest of those words lived in the heart of the Assyrian Empire.

School Certificate was approaching fast. School Certificate exercised a strange and inhuman regime. Every Fifth Former was expected to sit it, but only half could pass in each subject. I think only the latin classes were exempted from this execution of half its students. You had to pass four subjects, and a pass rate was 50%.
A cursory judgment of my marks would put me in the School Certificate fodder. But my parents seemed really to believe that somehow I would pass. I too was lulled to go with the flow. Miracles might happen if I conscientiously went back through my textbooks. I did so and made some progress. My subjects were latin, french, history and english.

I was becoming more tired and out of focus as the fateful time approached. Two things happened which suggest I needed some kind of intervention. I accidentally locked Dad in the boys' hut. He was doing some repair work in the hut, and I walked out and locked the door. Instead of rushing back when I remembered, I dallied. When I finally released him, he was in a towering rage.

The other was a public event, and may have made me a brief subject of gossip in the town. It was during school morning assembly, always a rumbustious occasion. The country was having a riotous election. The 60s young radicals had hijacked a public meeting, and driven Mr Holyoake into a nervous wreck. This was shown on evening television. I didn't condescend to have much interest in national politics, but the novelty of this pompous leader losing it delighted me.

Mum watched the scene also, and her laughter was ambivalent. By now we were TV audience professionals. No more tea towels, and we had a special TV room. That political riot was the first time I knew my voice was deepening when my laughter came out in a deep throat.

The next day at school, we gleefully discussed the pricking of Mr Holyoake. That event may have ushered the youth revolution into our school. From Dad's talk, I now learnt of rank disobedience from senior pupils. Senior boys defied a teacher, and then melted into their peer group. This was shocking news in a school where teachers were accustomed to hold a superstitious authority. The senior boys seemed to have adopted from the angry young radicals the Hoot. We younger pupils would hear its deep long drawn-out sound infrequently resound through the school.

That fateful morning assembly, I joined the throng of boys in the hall. Some boys started to pull me about. My shoe laces were knotted. In the scuffle I lost a shoe. At first, I was not greatly perturbed. I thought I would retrieve it after assembly. Then to my horror, I saw my shoe rise from the Sixth Form sitting space, and to the accompaniment of a faint hoot, crash on to the stage.

The arrival of the head master and the teachers on to the stage was imminent. I hurried to the stage. The shoe was outside my grasp. I thought I could jump on to the stage and retrieve the shoe before I got noticed. An idiotic thought, but I was tired and disgruntled. I jumped.

Until I began to write of this event, I had thought I just jumped, grabbed the shoe and was off the stage.
Now I remember, I crawled to the back of the stage, picked up the shoe and crawled back. The Hoot – as the event progressed – might have taken off the roof. When I was back on the ground, I saw Hugh staring at me in astonishment. Even Maurice was laughing. The situation was too unreal to anticipate any kind of retribution. The teachers must have thought the same. Nothing happened, and I am for ever grateful that Dad must have been the only person in the school kept in the dark.

Maurice and I were given special permission to revise our latin alone in the book store room. Naturally, that gave us ample opportunity to discuss. Maurice confided to me his contempt for the whole school system and for senior teachers. He was merely acting the role of the dutiful school boy for his own ends. When a senior teacher laid down the law, Maurice knew his bluff.

I approached the subject of the impending election. Maurice said the adult electorate should not have the vote as they voted like spoilt children. He gave his mother as an example. Maurice was working on certain scientific theories. I grew more wide‑eyed as Maurice showed me his anti-gravity diagrams. Maurice kept homing pigeons. I was tongue tied when he told me he had done a heart transplant on one. I think now he was testing me, how far could he stretch my credulity.

The Royal Family visited Gisborne to lead the celebration of the bi‑centenary of Captain Cook's arrival in Poverty Bay. It seemed the entire Gisborne adult population came out to greet Her Majesty.

In my upbringing, my family and every other family I knew about were poor relations to Her Majesty. She was the Fairy Queen. British history passed through a hue of romance and divine providence when it touched the Royal family. Everyone was unquestionably British.

Once when I visited a friend of Nan's, her home was a shrine to the Windsors. Our home kept a tome of a photographic history of the Royal family. It had the reverend presentation of a holy book, and the loving details of a family photographic album. One day at Hicks Bay, Mum lent this heirloom to her housekeeper. Her younger siblings played with it. When she returned it, they had made it a dog's breakfast.

We teenagers suddenly became cool about the regal visit. Everyone still got to their feet when the Royal Anthem played at public performances, but to us young people that was an ingrained response, like salivating to a bell. Scott and I condescended to watch on television the Maori action songs and speeches by the Queen and politicians.

Dad, Mum, and the girls attended the ceremony, and later cheered the Royals' exit on Britannia. The girls insisted to us they had visited the yacht, and had shared sausages with Her Majesty. But all Gisborne attended the spectacular fireworks display after the Royals had departed. Was that an omen for the British Royals? At school, the antics of the drunken Royal sailors on Gladstone road was for some days the main topic of hilarious conversation.

School Certificate was suddenly upon us. The initiation of adult bodies and adult responsibilities had also crept upon us. In my former childish class mates, I could detect the physique of adults. Many were gaining their drivers licences. When the first person in our Fourth Form class got her licence, we could scarcely believe it. We stood at the school car park, and watched her nonchalantly and expertly drive away. That was an auspicious occasion. Now if she misbehaved or was inattentive, she could maim or even kill someone.

The adult world with all its mysteries was just around the corner. I cautiously broached the subject of a drivers licence. That was met with a stone wall of opposition, and I gave up. There didn't seem any point as I certainly wasn't going to have access to a car. I had by this time discovered Tacitus. Tacitus' considered thoughts on governing the Roman Empire seemed a much loftier and easier issue than wrangling about access to a car.

On the day of my first exam, History, I awoke in the early hours of a Summer morning. The impending novel experience of a three hour exam loomed in front of me. I could not go to sleep. I got up and put on my school uniform. I looked outside the hut. Rays of light streaked the stop bank. Everything was still and silent. On some strange impulse, I began to walk towards the stop bank. I climbed to the top and looked around. The sluggish river and the dozy neighbouring cows reminded me of pictures of the Nile valley.

Nan had bought for me Ancient Egypt in the Great Ages of Man, Time Life series. I walked along the top bank, and watched as the sun bathed the valley in light. I returned. Still no one else was stirring. I entered the house. Perhaps I headed to the toilet.

Is that Lloyd? said Mum from the big bedroom.

I assented.

Wait, I'll get up, said Mum.

She came out a few minutes later in her dressing gown. I confessed to her that I was troubled about the exam. She went into the sitting room, and sat down in the big chair. I sat at her feet. I now confessed I did not think I would pass the exam. She affirmed that I would pass in her familiar tonic tone. I instantly felt better. It was so good here that I must pass like sunlight must pass darkness.

We talked about my exotic birth and infancy. I heard familiar stories about birth in a mud hut, Dad taking me home in a canoe, my love of bathing in the ocean and drinking coconuts. I asked her,

Did the Gilbertese appreciate their white colonial masters?

She said Gilbertese old people had told her that their myths promised them white Gods would arrive one day to bring them an island paradise. We were apparently the heralded white Gods. They liked us. I was relieved. Dad suddenly appeared though the doorway. We waved him back to bed.

It was breakfast time. We all prepared for school. Dad too was full of confidence for my exam success. Dad took me to Lytton. I joined the Fifth Form boys milling on the grass in front of the assembly hall. We were all nervous, even Hugh. Some of the boys were gruff second timers. Orders came that we should file into the assembly hall and take our seats. For an epoch we laboured. Then at last the clock competed its third revolution. As we flooded out the door, a man with a camera stopped me. Would I object to having my photograph taken for the Gisborne Herald? I willingly assented. He put me beside a class mate, Sandra.

We had entered together the 5P.1 class. Nicola was no longer in my class, and had disappeared from my thoughts. Sandra had become the new secret girl in my life. I am sure she was as ignorant about it as Nicola had been. We stood smiling together and the camera flashed.

The three other exams followed. At home, we all became convinced that I would particularly triumph in latin. I had filled in the huge gaps in my latin knowledge with vague poetic effusions. My parents thought they were both ingenious and correct. Now we waited, and I soon lost my anxieties. Life moved on to other preoccupations in the Gisborne hot summer.

One sunny morning, our mailbag was delved into in the house. I was excited when a bound volume addressed to me came out. I eagerly opened it. It was Renaissance Italy. I was collecting this Great Ages Of Man – Time Life series as they arrived irregularly in the mail bag. I opened the book on to lavish illustrations of renaissance art works and buildings. This was another new exciting adventure.

You passed in English, said Dad.

I started and looked up. Dad was reading from a small envelope. He handed the results to me. I had got English, a scraped‑through pass of 50%. The other marks were in the 20s and 30s.
At that moment the telephone rang. Dad answered it. He listened silently for several minutes. Then he said,

He passed English..

He listened silently again for several minutes. Then he put down the receiver. That was our neighbour, Mr Lewis.

Mr Lewis had the reputation of a good talker, impractical and a braggart. All three are damming faults among New Zealanders. He too owned a citrus orchard, had five children, and taught at Lytton. His origins were working class Pom.

Skill on the sports field, a winners pathology, and facts and more facts had been his escape to a profession and gentleman farmer in the colonies. He won medals at the Commonwealth Games. He brought over a beautiful and stirling English wife, and had five intelligent and attractive children brought up on a farm, cruelly thought by New Zealanders, to be a joke. He spent his last years not recognising anyone and shouting School Certificate Geography facts.

Mr Lewis' eldest child, Lynn, had passed School Certificate brilliantly. Mr Lewis was now rushing back to the school to find out about the results of other pupils. Shame settled upon the Gretton household. No Gretton child yet had passed School Certificate. Like Forrest Gump about Vietnam, my silence spoke volumes about Mr Bear, my disability, my inattention, my emotional turmoil.

My scraped-through pass in English had its own strange story. I had been given a twelve month subscription to TIME magazine for my fifteenth birthday. I liked to read out interesting passages. One evening, a few days before the English exam, I read out a passage. Mum corrected me that the ‘b’ in subtle was a ghost sound. That knowledge gave me the half‑mark to pass the English exam.

I could sense a gathering hostility descending upon my head. My parents might be in a dilemma with relations. I don't think they knew my history.

After lunch, I did what I had always done when confronted with a disquieting reality. I withdrew into my corner and took out my new Time Life book.

Very soon, I was a sightseer in the sunny plazas of renaissance Italy, and a student of the Italian artists and their patron Princes and Popes.