Richard Howarth had an open face: you could easily read on it the pleasure he took in wine and vintage cars. He was 57, lived in Wellington, kept a holiday apartment in Wānaka, and had recently accepted a generous financial package from his law firm. Don McDonald was nimble, and looked at life with an amused sideways glance. He was 71, lived in Picton, and had returned from a cycling tour across America with his second wife, Val.
Brian Miller talked fast and muttered even faster. He was always on the move, restless, searching, loyal – he visited David Bain in prison to show his support. He was 63, lived in Dunedin, and had no real need for a writing course – he was a pro. As a publisher and an author, he specialised in science textbooks, memoirs, and local histories such as his lively book about Macandrew Bay on Otago Peninsula.
Macandrew Bay School was presented with a surplus air raid siren after the war. The school committee viewed the new arrival, then could not resist taking it outside and winding it up on a still moonless night. After a few seconds of wailing, followed by the howling of all the neighbourhood dogs and lights going on all around the bay, the siren was tucked into the basement, never to be used again.
Tough little blades of grass stubbled the hard surface of Lisemore Park opposite the school, where I walked each lunchtime and ate the caterer’s delicious sandwiches. It was another new habit. I observed it with my usual bovine obedience – wandering into stands of pine trees, then wandering out and following a concrete path that curled up and over small hills and valleys. It made a nice break from the sound of my voice talking all morning in classroom twelve. I thought about how to keep the students occupied and possibly entertained in the afternoon. I thought about them all the time.
Jane Bloomfield, 45, blonde, sexy, with hooded eyelids, commuted from Queenstown, where she wrote about the adventures of Lily Max, a character she’d developed in her novels for young adults. Diane Wales was arch and witty, with a kind of moneyed nonchalance about her. She dressed well, and wrote, ‘After a life on the edges of remote airstrips, Sally Middleton, 70, now divides her time between painting and gardening, and caring for her elderly husband.’ Sally was small and industrious, a talented portrait artist. She wrote, ‘Diane Wales, now 74, was a young school teacher in Christchurch and married to her first husband when they produced three sons, who now live in London, the Cayman Islands and Auckland. Diane lives in Dunedin. She says about coming up to the week-long Autumn Art School, ‘I had to set up an incredibly complicated system to look after my 84-year-old husband.’ I thought about their ailing aged husbands.
Sarah Ballard, 61, was tall and willowy, a chatterbox, apparently nearly blind. She grew up in Manchester, and wanted to come to some kind of terms with her father, a doctor and an alcoholic, whom she remembered staggering up the stairs while her mother implored him to just die. Her eyesight was so bad that when she wrote at her desk she lowered her head barely more than an inch above the page. It always looked as though she’d dropped dead. This was my first teaching job and I didn’t want to lose anyone, but Sarah was wonderfully and exuberantly alive. I heard talk in the town that she had a beautiful singing voice. One day I asked if she would stand in front of the class and sing a folk ballad. My excuse was that it would demonstrate another way of telling a story. I just wanted to hear her sing. It was true what they said about her in town. I looked at Sarah as her voice soared around the classroom, and turned my head and wept.
There were a lot of tears in classroom twelve. I invited the painting teacher in the next-door classroom to come in and answer questions about her life. Gala Kirke talked about growing up in communist Slovakia. She talked about leaving for New Zealand after the Velvet Revolution. She talked about her paintings – art critic T. J. McNamara once identified her as ‘a rising star’ – and about how she seldom had time to paint since becoming a parent, and a teacher at Christchurch Girls’ High School.
She said she hadn’t talked about the earthquake before. When it struck she was tipped down a flight of stairs but didn’t think about that: she was desperately frightened for her two little boys. It took her and her husband two hours to drive 15 kilometres across the shattered city to their children’s playcentre. The memory of those two hours of fear rushed at her, ambushed her, as she sat in front of sixteen students in classroom twelve. She said they’d sold their house, were leaving Christchurch. She didn’t care all that much where they were going to live: the point was that it wouldn’t be in Christchurch.
Two days later I invited an ex-footballer to come in and answer questions about his life. There was a public notice in the school grounds advising that Richard Johnson would be holding a training clinic during the holidays. I heard shouts and laughter, and looked
