The rains this week very nearly came over the Stone Basin bridge. At low tide on Thursday afternoon, pied shags waited for the mullet by roosting on logs washed up in the basin. A few years ago, a car left the road and went over the edge; there used to be a phone box at the basin but vandals had destroyed it, so a man who was covered in blood walked to Pauline’s house and said his passenger was still in the car and could she help. She phoned 111, went down to the basin, jumped in, and did what she could for the passenger until the fire service and ambulance arrived. It’s just what you do, isn’t it, she said.
On Wednesday, she took her four stranded guests to the bus station, but the bus never arrived, and they were eventually told there was no bus. They said, Oh no. You should have seen their faces, said Pauline. They were good, lovely people, she said, who so much wanted to get where they were going. She thought, Do I really want to go all the way? But then she thought, Oh come on. We just chatted all the way to Awanui, she said, and found out everyone’s life stories and what’s happening in America and Queenstown and Kaitaia.
Had she heard about other acts of generosity in Kerikeri during the storm? Oh, she said, I’m sure there were. That afternoon a police constable said, No, Pauline was the only one who rang.
Her house will soon be in an exclusive cul-de-sac – there are plans for a bypass, the bridge at Stone Basin will be taken away, and Stone Hill will finish at the Stone Store. Her property really ought to be snapped up. But where will people go if there’s another flood? Oh, she said, they’ll just come to wherever I go to next, I suppose.
[July 15]
7 Greg O’Connor
The Policeman’s Friend
Life, reflected Greg O’Connor, is a journey that flows from the mountain to the sea. He wheeled out this banal observation three more times during the ninety minutes I spoke to the police association president in his Wellington office. Fair enough. It does actually have personal meaning for the guy. And yet O’Connor – as president since 1995, he acts as union executive for ninety-seven percent of police officers – appeared stuck somewhere up the back of the mountain, cemented in a position of resistance to even the slightest trickling criticism of New Zealand police.
The worst he said of his troops: ‘We’re not perfect.’ In 2007, these imperfections include the sordid rape trial of assistant commissioner Clint Rickards; the Dame Margaret Bazley report into 313 complaints of sexual assault against 222 police officers; the overturning of David Bain’s murder conviction by the Privy Council; the fiasco when commissioner Howard Broad held a press conference to deny he once watched a pornographic video involving unnatural acts with a chicken; and the revelations that police have lowered recruiting standards, inspiring the mocking Dominion Post headline ‘THICK BLUE LINE’.
O’Connor is the police spokesman to whom journalists routinely turn in the old game of providing balance. You can guarantee he’ll stick up for the cops every time, and quite often in a pugnacious, sneering, charmless manner. In person he’s a hearty sort of rooster, forty-nine, lean and sandy-haired, clever and sensitive, fond of polite cussings like ‘ruddy’ and ‘blimmin’, from solid West Coast Irish Catholic farming stock – he grew up in the Buller, went to school at the Granity convent, was taught by the same nun who taught his grandmother. He said, ‘I’m tribally socialist, that’s what my roots are, and you can’t escape that.’ He now heads what may be New Zealand’s strongest union.
He is married with three children. Michael, fourteen, was born with CHARGE syndrome. O’Connor said, ‘He’s reasonably severely intellectually handicapped … No, we knew from the second he was born. The doctor said, “There’s something wrong here.” But it was the best thing that ever happened, if I can say that, because we never knew Michael as anything other than a child with needs. I really feel sorry for people who don’t realise they’ve got a child with problems until the child’s one or two. Whereas with Michael the journey started at birth. He’s taken me and my wife places most other people don’t get to go.
‘We made a decision that we would never allow him to become an excuse for us not to do anything. Not long after he was born, I got promoted to Christchurch. Michael at that stage was very sick and not expected to live; basically he was in Wellington, dying. When I got the promotion, we started to say, “We can’t go because of Michael,” but then it was like, “Hey, we have to go.”’ They went, and O’Connor almost immediately stepped into a vacancy as a police association delegate.
O’Connor writes poetry. He probably talks it better. His last poem ‘was about how the southerly is Wellington’s saviour from that horrible nasty little yapping terrier that is the northerly.’ This sounded like windy nonsense, but he was alert to language and imagery when describing his former life as a serving officer. On attending a fatal car accident in Wellington, soon after graduating from Police College: ‘I poured his brains into an ice-cream container.’ On the very last case he investigated, in Christchurch before taking up his role as association president: ‘The worst kind. Stranger rape. Middle of the night. Old lady alone. Shocking.’
He said he sometimes thought about writing a novel. Disappointingly, it wouldn’t be crime fiction. ‘It
