Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

I have no patience with people who lie about their age, those vain hopers who shave a couple of years off in pursuit of an edge over suitors, employers, peers. They are fools of the highest order.

Because they’re doing it wrong. If you’re going to lie about your age, lie big. Round up!

I, for example, am incredibly well-preserved. Fine pale Irish skin, with the merest hint of laugh lines. Only a pebble or so heavier than my university weight. Gravity-defying bosom largely unravaged by years of patient service to my dairy-fed children. Slender dancer’s ankles and shapely calves the envy of the non-bicycling classes.

You’d never guess I’m well into my fifties.

I’m not. But admit it, I look amazing for 53. You cannot deny it.

OK, maybe there is such a thing as too big a lie. I confess, I’m actually 30.

Cough in base thirteen cough.

For another month. All right, week. Oh, if you insist, for another three days, and yes two if you’re reading this in New Zealand. (Thank goodness for the international dateline -- for once, time is, as the increasingly venerable poets wrote, on my side. Yes it is.)

Hence this little moment in the public confessional. Forgive me, but I believe it is de rigeur, and perhaps even a bit therapeutic, to have a wee hysterical-numerical breakdown at this point in one’s life. One never thinks it will happen to one, and then one day, one is suddenly staring one’s onrushing fifth decade in the face. Or is ostentatiously ignoring it while it tugs at one’s sleeve murmuring gravely “Don’t I know you?”

Or worse, Terry Pratchett style: “DON’T I KNOW YOU?” Et in Arcadia ego, memento mori, etc.

That is what’s so challenging about this one, isn't it? Turning thirty was a blessed relief, a liberation from the weight of having to be a child prodigy, to have done it all while unlined and unburdened. Mozart, Sylvia Plath, Jesus Christ – nice to see ya, now I don’t have to be ya. Phew.

But this birthday arrives as a kick in the pants. I say, what’s that irritable honking noise? Oh god, it’s time’s wingèd chariot parked out the front and leaning on the horn. Go away! Meanwhile, the cuckoo clock has started chirping midnight. Make it stop! Chop chop, tick tock, get a wriggle on.

All you can do is joke about it. (Knock knock. Who's there? Interrupting 40th birthday. Interrupting 40th b- oh.)

Trust me, I know this is an entirely artificial, trumped-up, 21st century, first-world, base-ten “trauma.” It’s nothing that can’t be fixed with a pair of sexy leather boots, some caramel cupcakes, a great deal of champagne, and the good wishes of sweet friends and dear family. All birthdays are lovely, and I’m unspeakably lucky to be experiencing this one at all, let alone in such propitious circumstances.

This is the truth: the only thing worse than getting older is the alternative. After recent sobering news in my own family, I’m happily reconciled to my new round number. Welcoming it, even. I just think if it’s all right with you, I’ll do it in French, because everything sounds so much hotter in French.

Femme d’un certain âge: c’est moi.

When two bloggers meet, a cone of silence descends in order to facilitate the mutually assured non-destruction-of-privacy pact. Also so that we can hear each other over the children.

Busytown was subject to a warm Southerly front on a recent weekend. And although it was wildly convivial and very productive, we totally neglected to record it for podcasterity. Our bad. You’ll have to rely on David’s memory, since I don’t have one these days.

I am at liberty to tell you that someone finally did tie Dr Haywood to a chair and got a book out of him. It wasn’t me, and it wasn’t the fetching and brilliant Jen, whose job is merely to beat him with a stick until he posts something to the blog.

No, he cunningly auto-bondaged himself to the deskchair-printing-press-o-matic. It looks a bit like this:

And the results - I’ve had a preview -- are seriously exquisite. A collection of essays you will be proud to own, and to purchase for your friends and relations.

I was persuaded to take an experimental spin in the same chair, and all I can say is, “Do it to Julia!” Sorry, make that, “Thank you, David,” and “Watch this space, readers.”

But I know what you’re really looking for here. Dirt on the kid. I’m sorry; professional courtesy (the same moral code that prevents sharks from attacking lawyers) forbids me from pimping out Bob. That is David’s paternal prerogative. But I can tell you that Bob’s reputation for badness? Has been greatly exaggerated.

As my older son asked, after the visitors had departed, “Did they put a spell on him before they arrived or something?”

Not that it was a contest, but I'm proud to say my younger kid totally kicked Bob’s nappy-padded arse in the badness stakes. Here is the vanquished one, shortly before being stretchered onto the troop train back to Manhattan:

It wasn’t a fair fight. In a rainy day cage-match between bad baby and bad toddler, put your money on the welterweight with a toy in each fist, every time. Bring it, one year olds! If you think you're hard enough!

Plus, I have to say, Bob’s trash-talking was pathetic to the point of non-existent, whereas the T-Boy is still holding forth on Bob’s inability to either float like a butterfly or sting like a bee. More than a week after repelling the infant invasion, he will occasionally wake up in the morning, stretch, and suddenly bellow “I wike Bob the Builder. BUT I NO WIKE BOB THE BABY.”

Did I mention he is two and a half? As far as I can make out, despising people who are smaller and more winsome than you is a necessary developmental stage (it continues through high school; I’m still growing out of it), and it is very hard work. Also hard work is fighting your corner against people who are bigger and more articulate than you; not just parents, but your toweringly huge big brother.

It is true that this time last year, big brother was going through a “gnnnngggggh!” stage of knuckle-biting frustration with the knee-high lego-wrecker. Especially just after we took down the gate that had previously fenced off the lego corner. (Not for glasnost reasons, but because it had already been half-demolished by a persistent little East Berliner clambering on it to peer over at the material delights of the West).

There were even fisticuffs, inasmuch as you can have fisticuffs with somebody a quarter your size.

But these days, the increasingly amiable big lad is much more patient with the little guy’s foibles. He delights in lending him cultural capital -- have you ever heard a two year old performing the Doctor Who theme, or wheeling around the house screeching “Ek-ter-min-AAAATE!”? It's bloody scary and incredibly cute. Big brother is also intrigued by the whole business of positive psychology, which feeds into his own sense of bigboyosity. Need a distraction or incentive when your Lego is under threat from insurgents? It's no problem, when you can operate the DVD player, reach the food cupboard, and operate the ice cream scoop.

You would think this was a strategic relationship to be cultivated by the junior partner. But no, the little guy is still fighting the last war. When he’s not waking up cussing out Bob the blameless baby, he likes to greet the day with a shout of “BRUBBA GO BACK TO YOU BED!”

Since this wero is delivered right into the ear of the parents whose bed he himself has also invaded in the night, it lacks the ring of authority. It is also not a nice way to wake up, for any of us.

(Yes, we solved the co-sleeping problem. We got a bigger bed).

I don’t want to paint an unbalanced portrait of my younger son. He is the butterfly to his older brother’s diving bell, a natural upper, the sort of person for whom the word “impish” was coined. He delivers delicate kisses and random snacks to family members at will, sits gently on the cat to read his books, and assures me daily that he wuvs me, a WOT. When not channeling the Great Dictator, he is chipper and charming and funny - Cary Grant in size 4 ladybird gumboots.

And although I miss his Gerald McBoing-Boing/ Marcel Marceau days of communicating entirely via pantomime and sound effects, I do love that he can now tell us what he wikes and what he doesn’t wike. I just wish he’d put down the bullhorn.

A month or so ago, big brother got an impressive summer haircut at the barber's, his shortest ever. As you can see, he was transformed from Beatle...

to Baseball Hall of Famer:

Immediately, the younger son asked me to chop off his own baby-fine golden curls so he could “look like Brubba.” Yes, these shagadelic curls right here:

I took a deep breath, sobbed quietly into my sleeve, then picked up the scissors and gave him the sweetest of Eton crops. The cutting process was surprisingly painless for both of us.

But holding him up to the mirror afterwards turned out to be a monumentally dumb idea for two reasons, one of which was that, not having double-jointed elbows, I had no way to block my ears.

“NOOOOOOO!!!! That NOT good. Want it SPIKY like Brubba! You a BAD MUMMY. Raaaarrrrrrrrgh!” und so weiter.

It is not easy to turn wisps into spikes. Luckily, before I was a bad mummy, I was a bad-arse 80s teen. Back-combing and hairspray saved the day, finally winning me that sought-after “I WIKE IT!”

Man, I wish I were brave enough to try that on with my hairdresser.

As a child, I was always flummoxed when grown-ups asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. The question was moot, because I didn’t really want to grow up, let alone put my book down to answer the question. The polite thing to do was to fudge things with a white lie (concert pianist? astronaut? writer?). As a result, growing up seemed intimately connected in my anxious young mind with learning to become a well-intentioned, habitual, social fibber.

Which is not true in the least. Is it?

From an adult perspective, I’m still not sure why people ask that question. Is it for the benefit of the enquirer or the enquiree? Is it a genuine attempt to discover something about this child in particular, or is it a wistful projection of one’s own buried desires, making the child an oracle of all that might have been, or might still be if only we could stop fibbing to ourselves about the fact that we have been and gone and grown up and still don’t quite know what we want to be?

There was another path, of course: tell the truth and damn the torpedoes. Blurting “but I don’t want to grow up” might have led to some very interesting conversations, maybe even some that would have nudged my inner child past its seriously arrested developmental age.

Of course, many children are more intrepid than I was. Both of my sons, for example. The younger one is still not quite verbal enough to go on the record about his ambitions beyond hollering “Wookit me, I a firefighter!” while waving the vacuum-cleaner hose. But he barrels headfirst into unfamiliar situations (and unfamiliar people) with a giant grin on his face and the full expectation of a happy outcome for all. He clambers and climbs and leaps and then crashes to the ground and comes up smiling. It gives me grey hairs, but I love it.

The bigger boy is a fraction more sober and cautious. “I’m really a safety-conscious kind of a guy. By the way, want to see an awesome new stunt?” But as he rapidly approaches the official age of reason, he has no fear (for the moment, anyway) of growing up, and no fear of that open-ended question about what he wants to do. Most of the time, he doesn’t even wait to be asked. Every day, lately, half a dozen conversations – with me, the postman, the bus driver, his teacher, anyone who happens to be standing nearby -- begin (or end) with a familiar phrase:

When I grow up, I’m going to build a New Zealand town exactly the same as New Zealand, right down to the ice cream, so Americans can get a taste of what New Zealand is really like.

When I grow up, I’m going to invent a real toy steam train powered by tiny lumps of coal.

When I grow up, I’m going to become the owner of McDonalds and make sure the food is healthier and that the only alcohol they serve is red wine, which is good for you.

When I grow up, I’m going to run for President, and declare that every single street should have a crosswalk at each end. Not everyone can be President, you know, but it’s worth trying. By the way, why can’t people like me vote? I mean, people who are my age, but smart enough to understand politics? People who vote with their brains and not their feelings? And by the way, why don’t they have a rule that only smart people can vote? Whatever age they are?

When I grow up, I am so totally getting an iPod.

OK, I’ve finally decided what I want to be when I grow up. As incisive and as optimistic as this kid.

His intellectual curiosity knows no limit. He isn’t 100% sure what came before the Big Bang, but is keen that it’s sorted out in his lifetime, so he has told his father and his colleagues to look into the possibility that it was some sort of gas-chemical-atom reaction. They’re on it.

He may need to tone it down a bit, though. One of the things you discover as you grow up is that there’s a fine line between being a technically minded pedant, and being a bit of a dick. Sometimes no line at all.

The other day, for example, he interrupted his brother’s chirping rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to point out that, in fact, stars only appear to twinkle because of subtle changes in the gases of the earth’s atmosphere, so it would be better to be silent rather than sing that first line.

Irresistible Force, I don’t believe you’ve met Immovable Object? Little brother, having the innocent poetic soul of a two year old, plus the skeptical mind and pachydermous hide of an experienced younger sibling, twinkled on regardless.

Speaking of newsflashes from the frontiers of science, we’ve all been quite excited about the launch of the Large Hadron Collider. Especially after being persuaded by astrophysicist dad and his clever colleagues that the chance of it creating a black hole that will instantly swallow up the universe is as close to zero as makes no odds.

Even with this reassurance, I nervously double-checked with our experts on the day itself. Because a) if it was the last day of the universe, I would skip cleaning the toilets in favour of smelling the roses, and b) what a bummer of a cliffhanger it would be, exiting the cinema of life before the final reel in that movie about whether the free world ends up in the hands of an earnest, smooth-tongued Ivy League intellectual, or an essentially unqualified moose-hunter who doesn’t blink.

I imagine it would have been even more of an eschatological letdown if you were one of the fundamentalist Christians who think the Book of Revelations is non-fiction. How annoying to be raptured with a bang -- a big one! -- but sans the whimpering of all the sinners condemned to suffer the torment of the last days. Where’s the fun in that? (No disrespect, but that stuff is wack. Give me a mercilessly anonymous universe with all its surprising beauty any day, over a capricious creator who’s already written the last chapter killing off most of my favourite characters).

Anyway. As I home in on yet another birthday of my own, I realise it’s not so scary to grow up. It’s relatively painless, and it certainly beats the alternative.

With two rambunctious, open-hearted young people in my life, every day I get to act my age and my shoe size. I still don’t know exactly what I want to “be,” but I sort of did become a writer. I never really put down my book, but I have learned to look up from it occasionally. And I got much better at answering questions, as well as more adroit at asking them.

Most encouragingly, it turns out that being a grown-up is less about fibbing, and more about marveling at the many forms truth takes, writing and rewriting your own story as you go along, while discovering other people’s endlessly fascinating narratives. I find that I do want to know, now, what other people want to be, whatever age they are. It's a good place to be.

Plus, I have so totally got an iPod.

Just over a week ago, an ancient honey locust tree was badly damaged in a storm. No ordinary tree, this: it was one of a dozen “witness trees” remaining at Gettysburg, under whose branches Union soldiers rested during the battle, and under whose shade the crowd came to hear Lincoln make his famous address some months later.

Last week, my family lost one of our witness trees. My nana’s elder brother, my first son’s namesake, Uncle Jim, James Murphy NZD1188, Chief Petty Officer of the Royal New Zealand Navy, in his ninety-eighth year.

He was ready to go, wanted to be with his beloved Nora and their first child who died as an infant. A strong, hard-working man who lived in his own house with his faithful cat until well into his nineties, he had suddenly become frail and dependent, and he wasn’t best pleased about that. In his last years he was always apologizing for being so weak.

As my mum put it, he wanted to go, but his strong heart just wouldn’t give up.

I have a black and white photo of him as a boy, taken on the porch of the live-in police station in Christchurch that the family had moved to after a first posting in Bluff. He’s an upright young fellow in a scratchy-looking suit, gazing frankly into the camera lens with the faintest ghost of a smile. It’s the same smile that hovers over my older son’s face when he’s just about to tell an enormous fib, lift the lid on a significant secret, or just share an old joke.

Jim joined the Royal Navy at twenty-two as an engineer, and was appointed to the rank of engine room artificer, fifth class. When war broke out, he served on the HMS Leander, an Achilles-class cruiser, escorting troop ships through the Middle East to England. The Leander stuck around in Egypt for a while, where its duties included destroying a tuna cannery in Somalia by order of the Red Sea Force:

When information was received that a factory at Banda Alula had completed the manufacture of 1000 cases of canned fish for Italian consumption, the Senior Naval Officer Red Sea Force instructed the Leander to carry out Operation CANNED to demolish the factory and a wireless direction-finding station without causing casualties among the workers or damage to the native village.

The Leander anchored offshore, radioed an evacuation order to the shore station, catapulted the Walrus aircraft off the deck so it could dive-bomb the fish factory, and sent several dozen shells after it for good measure. If it all sounds a bit Spike Milligan from this distance, there was a crucial strategic point to Operation CANNED. As Jim put it, “They were feeding the enemy, weren’t they?” Yes sir. No more tonno al oglio for you, Mr Mussolini!

Back in the Pacific Theatre, helping the Americans to run interference on Japanese convoys, the Leander was holed by a Japanese torpedo during a fierce battle off Kolombangara the Solomon Islands in July 1943.

The torpedo hit shortly after one a.m. With the ship badly damaged, listing heavily to port, and both forward dynamos out of commission, Jim worked like a navvy in the forward engine room to keep the remaining engines going while pumping out the waist-high water. As he observes in the interview he gave Megan Hutching for the book Against the Rising Sun: New Zealanders Remember the Pacific War, after several hours of this, “I was a bit tired.” Relieved at his post some time later, he had a quiet medicinal moment back in the mess: “I had a bottle of rum, about three tots, so I drank the lot. I downed that and it might as well have been water. It had no effect on me.”*

As the ship limped to Tulagi where it would be temporarily repaired by Americans with concrete mixers, the extent of the casualties became clear. Twenty-eight men had been killed in the A Boiler room and the switchboard room, and fifteen injured. From Tulagi, Jim was allowed to send a telegram home to Nora, just five words: “Safe and well love Jim.” There were prayers for the dead in Tulagi, but they would have to wait until returning to Devonport to recover the bodies and conduct a proper funeral.

“They couldn’t identify anything except two of them, just bits and pieces, body pieces. … My mate, the senior chief engine room artificer, was one. I had to take over his duties. Later, his wife – they had one child, a little girl – was so overcome that she committed suicide with the child. She turned on the gas and put their heads in the gas oven at home.”

So much sadness. So much luck, good and bad. The best artificer in the world couldn’t have saved those who died.

But the men in the dynamo room escaped drowning thanks to some of Jim’s foresighted tinkering. The only access to and from this room was a watertight door that, in the event of a battle, had to be kept sealed until the all clear. “I thought, if the ship’s damaged and this place leaks, we’re going to be drowned.” Puzzling it out, Jim spotted a ventilation grilled in the ceiling and got busy: he shortened the screws that held the grille in place and welded together a ladder out of scrap metal, so that if needed, you could climb up and, with a bit of effort, kick the grille clear. Voilà: an instant emergency exit.

When that torpedo blasted a hole so big “you could drive a bus through it” in the armour-plated side of the ship, Jim’s MacGyver-esque bit of business worked exactly as planned for the men in the dynamo room. They swam in the dark through the rising water to the ladder, climbed up, and busted their way out.

Or so Jim surmised from the single laconic comment of one of the lucky survivors: “Thanks, Spud.”

He didn’t mind not being feted more vigorously. “It was a highlight for me, amongst all the dreary sadness. But it was just another part of the job.”

If you’ve seen our short film Dead Letters or read the short story on which the film was based, you might remember the scene where a mother recognizes her son in newsreel footage from Egypt. That was Jim! But I’m informed by Uncle Tony that the film got the dialogue wrong – instead of a tearful, heartbroken gasp, Nana Murphy leapt to her feet and ejaculated in a pure Cork brogue, “JAYSUS, IT’S JIMMY!”

The other difference between life and the film version -- which is played for sentiment rather than humour -- is that our Jimmy came home.

But not before transferring to the HMNZS Gambia to help bring home New Zealand PoWs from Japan, a sobering task; the men were skin and bones. Many of them had paired off to take care of each other, and Jim never forgot how heartbreaking it was to have to split them up, some to the hospital ship, some to go straight home, perhaps never to see each other again.

Had he ever considered the possibility of being taken prisoner himself?

“Yes. You had several options. To be burnt alive, to be scalded, to be overboard and drown, to be overboard and eaten by the sharks, to die of dehydration if you were out there afloat - there were all sorts of options, survival being the preferred one!”

Lucky Jim got the preferred option. Settled down in Devonport, raised three beloved children, worked as a metalwork and engineering teacher, had a long and happy retirement with Nora.

I profoundly regret that I didn’t take the boys to see him one last time on our most recent trip home. Logistics, the usual press of competing obligations, and reluctance to impose on an old man who was not well (foolish, perhaps, he might well have loved it) vs. a small boy who wishes he could have “had a little chat” with his great great uncle. I’ll second-guess myself about that for a long time.

But I’m profoundly grateful that we have so many of Uncle Jim's stories -- some from the horse’s mouth, preserved in ink and paper; others now destined to be always told secondhand, diluted and embroidered down the years.

Meanwhile, the tree at Gettysburg, though badly battered, is hanging on, against all the odds: “It's not pretty, but it's alive,” said a Park Service spokeswoman. With luck, it will live for years more, keeping company the other trees who sheltered dying and wounded men, who stood witness as Lincoln said “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

And the good news is that park officials say there are likely more witness trees than have so far been surveyed.

So who are the witness trees in your family, and what have they seen? Will you ask them before they fall? Go and visit this weekend, with tea and cake. Have a little chat. You won't regret it.

--
* This and all quotes from Jim Murphy that follow are from Megan Hutching, ed, Against the Rising Sun: New Zealanders Remember the Pacific War. Harper Collins, 2006.

Just when you start to think that No. 8 wire is an outdated myth, a Christchurch inventor unveils his personal jetpack at the world's biggest air show in OshKosh,Wisconsin. Unless Glenn Martin -- who coincidentally shares a name with another aviation pioneer -- is the cleverest spoof since Forgotten Silver?

We saw it on the New York Times website this morning, where science reporter John Schwartz fairly drools over it. A headline with “jetpack” in it makes for a no-brainer breakfast-table click, but it was the New Zealand accent on the accompanying video that had all of us -- most especially the almost-seven-year-old -- sitting up straight and listening with rapt attention while our paterfamilias read the story out loud.

Glenn Martin's machine is noisy, unwieldy, and driven by a four-stroke engine. It's basically an airborne lawnmower -- the flying version, perhaps, of that other dorky mower-inspired futuristic travel device, the Segway. Certainly the Martin jetpack doesn't look nearly as 21st C as this Buzz Lightyear outfit, dreamed up by a Swiss Icarus and test-flown only a few months ago.

But who cares - it flies! That’s news! TVNZ was quick off the mark, with the lucky Ian Sinclair looking pretty chuffed about being the first journalist to get a ride on the thing. Meanwhile, a teaser video has been up on YouTube for a few days, long enough to get 35,000 hits so far and presumably many more to come.

Expect the inevitable deluge of terrible puns about flying kiwis, and the usual palaver about kiwi ingenuity (viz Simon Dallow intoning the immortal words “After more than 25 years toiling away in his garden shed...” Mate, that's some garden shed). Expect it to turn up in the next series of Flight of the Conchords, maybe.

But the most appealing and, to my mind, authentically NZ thing about the whole story? The whole family helped out. Not just Martin’s teenage son, who gave it a whirl last year, but, back in the early days of the project, an even gutsier test pilot:

In June 1997, seven weeks after the birth of his second child, Mr. Martin figured his prototype was now powerful enough to lift its first flier, so long as that person weighed less than 130 pounds. So he turned to his wife. “I said, ‘Hey, Vanessa, what are you doing tonight?’ ”

Now that’s what I’m talking about. That's what you expect from the first country to give women the vote. No way the Wright Bros or les frères Montgolfier were ballsy enough to give a post-partum mother of two first go on their balsa-wood and tissue paper contraptions. Vanessa Martin, fearless aviation pioneer and kiwi heroine, we salute you!