Aug 13, 2001
Most kids were a lot better at throwing stones than me. When they threw a stone it went hard and straight and pretty much to where they wanted it to. They could hit the cups on telephone poles, (insulators I think they’re called), hard enough to smash them, and the policeman from Manunui came out fairly often to lecture us about it at school and try to find out who was doing it. “Now Eric.” he would say, interviewing Tangi Jones, “I don’t want none of your lies, now.” But they never caught anyone.
Tera Selby could throw a stone from outside the baker’s and land it on the railway bridge. You would hear the wind woosh past his arm as it took off, and then a few seconds later you would hear it clatter on the sleepers of the bridge. He could do it every time. And he was only fourteen. He should have gone for the Olympics.
In our family wee weren’t allowed to throw stones, but of course we did. You had to try. But anything I threw would sort of lob towards where you wanted it, and never hit anything. Barry hit a thrush once. It was standing on a log looking the other way and thinking about something else, and he hit fair in the back of the head with a piece of pumice, and woodened it. I suppose it was a fluke, but it was pretty impressive just the same.
We were swimming in the creek one day, Barry and me, when a bunch of kids from the pa came by on the road at the top of the bank, and started throwing green blackberries at us. It seemed to need some sort of a response, so I picked a stone up off the bottom and shied it at them. I usually missed, and I thought I’d missed this time, and the stone went over their heads, but there was a yell and then that long “Hoooo!, Hooooo!” that Maori kids make when they’re hurt or defeated or disappointed.
Barry said “You’d better get home.” and I cleared out. Up the bank and through the pine plantation. I don’t know if they chased me, but if they did they must have given up. Perhaps Barry talked them out of it.
Anyway, I got home, and got changed, and since there was nothing much else to do. I thought I’d go and split some firewood down at the end of the section. I’d more or less forgotten the swimming pool thing when I happened to look up in time to see old Mrs Mahu and a string of kids of various sizes come round the side of the house and head for the back door. Among the kids was Hubby Takiwa with blood on the side of his face. They hadn’t seen me, being rather out of their element coming around our place and busy absorbing the strangeness of it all, so I got behind the shed quick.
I heard old Mrs Mahu knock at the door, and I knew what would happen next. She was an old time Maori, with moko on her chin, and not much of a grip of English, but she was really the elder of the pa, most of the men having died young of Tb or gone away when the sawmills closed. Mum had taken an interest in the pa, its history and so on, and she and Granny Mahu were on pretty good terms. Mum would call me to get my half of the story, and one thing we had always been taught was that when you were called you answered and came running, regardless.
This didn’t seem to me to be a good idea. My side of the story had several shortcomings. There was the forbidden matter of throwing stones. “You must never throw stones!”. Then there was the matter of failing to as certain death or injury after an accident, not to mention failure to render assistance. More important still was the fact that if anyone deserved a bump on the head, it wasn’t Hubby. He was a gentle kid, not much to look at and not very switched on, but there was no bitterness in him, and he was more often than not, the victim of his mates’ hot temper. If you ever heard someone going up the track to the pa with a long and monotonous “Hoooo, hoooo, there was a good chance it would be Hubby. If it had been Victor or Pooh Bear that had collected the rock you might have said they had it coming to them. But not Hubby.
However, failure to show up when called was an even more serious offence than throwing stones et cetera.. I seemed to be in what is called a cleft stick. What to do?
I sat down with my back to the shed, out of sight of the back door, and stuck both thumbs in my ears, and stayed like that for perhaps half an hour or more. Finally, when everyone seemed to have gone I went back to my wood splitting, in order to build up a bit of virtuous credit.
Of course there was an inquiry when I had to come in for tea, to which I pleaded no harmful intention, and ignorance of the result. This was not strictly true, and I doubt that Mum believed me, but she was always pretty soft hearted, and she let me off with a caution. Perhaps she knew what a hopeless stone thrower I was, and that it would have had to have been an accident. It’s a good thing Dad wasn’t involved.
Hubby appeared at school next day with a piece of bandage and some sticking plaster above one eyebrow. You could see it was Mum’s work. She’d been a nurse once. Rather surprisingly Hubby and even his mates, showed me unexpected respect after that. Evidently they must have thought it all “utu” for the green blackberry attack, and perhaps they also thought that I could hit anything I cared to. I didn’t raise the matter again, and neither did they.
Fifty years later I attended a reunion at that school. Most of my contemporaries had died by then, Victor with Tb as young as fifteen. Pooh Bear was still preserved in a more or less moribund state behind a hillock of empties in his parents’ old house. But one of Hubby’s grand nephews told me he was still alive and living at Flaxmere. I told him about the stone throwing incident. “When you see him,” I said, “tell him I’m sorry.”