It was just one of those small towns that Frank had lived in when young. His father had never stuck at anything for very long and they had moved often. Now, for the first time he was back in the town where he had spent his high-school years.
His wife, his second wife, had been brought up here. A Moller. One of the large tribe that had stemmed from Herbert and Sarah Moller who had settled in the district in the early days. She had insisted that he come with her to this family reunion to meet hordes of people that he did not know and, truth to tell, did not wish to know. He had always meant to come back sometime but she had dragged him, half the length of the country, at the worst possible time, mid-summer. He had put his redundancy money into a pest-control business and was struggling to get himself established. This was the busy part of the year. Already that day, he had fielded four calls on his oh-two-five number. He had stalled the callers by pleading a family bereavement the dead relatives being, of course, the long dead Herbert and Sarah. He would get back to them in a few days. He only hoped that they’d wait that long.
He was not a particularly gregarious person, never more happy than when wandering off by himself. Something, fortunately, that his wife understood without sharing. She had not been particularly hurt when he insisted that his involvement in the festivities be no more than a few token appearances.
He wandered the remembered streets. Much had happened in forty years, but then again, much hadn’t. The town was something of a backwater. Some of the old firms were still represented. Other businesses bore the names of school contemporaries. The familiar names, voices from the past, released a flood of memories and he felt pangs of something very close to regret. Nostalgia is truly bitter sweet. It can be very painful at times.
He had enjoyed his years here, the stay had been longer than most others of his young life, and he had believed that his family had finally settled for good. His world had been secure, his parents omniscient and omnipotent. He had not reached the stage of being a teen-aged know-it-all: of being
THE HOME OF MEMORIES Page 2 Sosian embarrassed by their stupid outdated ideas. It was hard, at this distance of time, to realise that his greatest wish of that period had been for a sheet of roofing iron with not too many nail holes.
And was their old house still there? He fetched the car and went to see but it was gone. Perhaps he just no longer recognised it. Cranvell Road had changed so much, the empty sections had filled. Forty years was a long time. Once, long ago, the road had led to the district of that name, hence ‘Cranvell Road’, but not in his time. A little beyond where they had lived, at the bottom of the hill, there had been a gate and beyond the gate the swamp and the embankment of the former road extension. Built in the days of horse traffic, it had taken the direct route. But even before the advent of motor traffic, it had proved to be too narrow, too prone to subsidence, and impossibly expensive to maintain. The road that replaced it made a wide detour to the west along the foot of the hills.
And oh! Those summer afternoons, those long halcyon afternoons, that he had spent in the swamp with the Clarke boys from next door and the Robinsons from further down. That wilderness had been their kingdom, their exclusive property. By then, the efforts to drain the area had long since been abandoned. The drains dug with high hopes and sweat had to a large extent fallen in. The flood pumps expected to be the farmers’ salvation had turned out to be futile expense. It was never to be farmland. It was a place of broken hearts and empty bank accounts.
But for the boys, it was a primeval wonderland of rush and sedges, head high scrub, blackberry and young kahikatea, a place remote from the restraints of civilisation and adult intervention. They had explored, built huts, shot at pukeko with home-made bows, and fought with any non-gangmembers who ventured into their domain. They had had epic mud fights, and made excursions down to the main river in their unstable tin canoes. How proud he had been of his and how often had he been tipped out while trying to catch the baby ducklings on the water, something that he had to admit that he had never been successful at. Although scarcely days out of the egg, they would dive deep below the surface and come up who knew where in the weed beds that waved languidly in the current.
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In winter, the swamp had been permanently under water and a no-go area. Although more than fifty miles from the sea, it was only inches above normal high-tide levels and the run-off was minimal. But in summer, the surface was stable and dry. Both being relative terms of course. In places the peat layer remained bouncy suggesting a liquid consistency furhter down but the mat could be walked on with reasonable care. That changed with a spring tide. At that time, as the creek backed up and the drains that still flanked the embankment filled with water, the eels would gather at the low points from which it would first spill out onto the surrounding area. When it spilled over, they would actually slither ahead of the spreading flood onto the dry ground itself. He had always wondered how they knew the points where it would spill over first. And, on one occasion, he had been standing beside a derelict flood-pump shed when an eel came out of the creek, climbed the steep stop-bank, skirted the shed, and dropped into the drain on the far side. How did it know the drain was there?
Since he was so close, he must go and see what the place looked like now. And while he thought about it, he had never followed the embankment to the far end. The near end had held excitement enough. Until that moment, he had never wondered where it met the new road. So why not find out? He called his wife on the cell phone to tell her where he was going and that he was likely to be some time and she accepted it resignedly. He had often played the explorer, although not of late, trudging the routes of former coach roads and branch railways, even though there was never much left there to see, bringing home such priceless treasures as fish plates or enamel signs that said ‘Ladies Waiting Room’. There was no understanding the things that grown men got up to. It was a cross that women must bear.
The gate was gone and in its place a solid fence but the embankment was still evident and, as the first hundred metres was in private property and in grass, he asked permission at the nearby house. That permission was given readily but, since it was assumed that he was a stranger, he was warned that the swamp was a dangerous place. Some chap had got lost there the previous summer and not
THE HOME OF MEMORIES Page 4 Sosian been found in spite of an extensive search. He had best not leave the embankment. ‘Was it possible to get through to the other end?’ he asked. Unfortunately not. The one-way wooden bridge, sound as he remembered it, and another further on had both been dismantled years before. But even as far as the creek would be something.
Over the fence from the paddock, the embankment was waist high with bracken and the thought of having to push through it for perhaps a kilometre gave him stay for a moment. But he had come this far, hundreds of kilometres, and might never be back. He climbed the fence and pushed his way forward. He was soon glad that he had done so. The brackon first became stunted and then was no more. The track along the embankment became as easy to follow as in his youth. Things looked just as he remembered them too although, in fact, the growth from that time must have long since contributed to the peat layer below. But it was pleasing to see that nothing apparently had changed and the summer afternoon was as balmy and uplifting as the many in his memory.
The big surprise was the bridge, the bridge supposedly dismantled, yet obviously still as sound as it was all those many years ago. And someone was leaning over the rail watching the stream as it went its quiet way below. The people at the house had said nothing about anyone else coming in before him but that wasn’t surprising since they’d lied about the bridge. Strange though, there hadn’t been another car at the road end. Stranger still, the bracken hadn’t been disturbed. It could only mean that this person had come in from the other end. So it was possible!
As he approached, he realised that it was someone that he knew. Colin Clarke who had been the leader of the gang in the old days. Forty years had passed and yet they recognised each other immediately. The greeting was rapturous.
They filled each other in on what they had been doing in the last four decades. Colin had gone into a bank from school in the days when such jobs were easy to get. He had become a manager in time moving whereever the bank directed him. The bank had been his whole life. But now, due to bank amalgamations and bank closures, he had found himself out in the cold. He was bitter. So
THE HOME OF MEMORIES Page 5 Sosian much for his years of loyalty. He had come north the day before. He still had relatives in the town who might be able to help him find something. And since he was in the area, he had naturally had to come down to their old stamping ground for what might be his last look. They had certainly been great days.
Frank, never a scholar, had gone for the big money in the freezing works as a knife hand but as he said, “They’ve been worse than the banks.” Most of the places where he’d once worked were now history. He had finally worked his way into middle management but that had been no guarantee of security. One month the company was talking expansion, the next about which plants to close. He had come out of it with some money but, being in his fifties, no prospects. So he had bought a business. A bit late to start on his own perhaps but a lot better than doing nothing.
They reminisced about the old days, filled each other in on the doings of old aquaintances that they had come across over the years. But mostly they just hung over the rail watching the water, saying very little, just happy to be together; to be sharing their common past.
Frank’s wife Beth, became alarmed when it got dark and he had not returned and more alarmed still when some well-meaning person told her that an ex-local, Colin Clarke, had gone missing in that same swamp the previous summer. He’d never been found. She tried to convince herself that Frank had enough sense to keep himself out of trouble. But where was he? He wasn’t answering his cell phone. Hopefully, it was just a flat battery, that happened sometimes, but that still didn’t answer the question of where he’d got to.
She could call as often as she liked and Frank would never know. He and Colin had stumbled, all unknowingly, into another reality, into a golden afternoon that had no ending. An afternoon of cloudless skies and pleasing warmth, of ripening berries and sweet subtle earth scents. Cicadas filled their ears with songs of summer exaltation, damsel flies wafted to and fro like animated thistledown above the polished jade of the stream and, on its surface, a fussy mother duck marshalled her flotilla of yellow fluff. Night could fall in other places but not there. Time had no
THE HOME OF MEMORIES Page 6 Sosian mandate there and the impudent demands of a cell phone could not intrude because cell phones had never been invented.