Claire Trevett
Finds there’s engagingly more to the new PM than Budgets, speeches and suits as she spends a day on his old home turf
At the school PM Bill English went to there is a 15-year-old cat called Lucky which likes to run off with the rosary beads.
Teresa Jarvis, the principal of St Thomas’ Aquinas in Winton, describes it as “an eccentric Catholic”.
The Prime Minister is at the school for the first time since he was upgraded from Deputy Prime Minister.
There is a photo of English as a schoolboy in the school’s fundraising recipe book alongside English’s contributed recipe: a chocolate self-saucing pud.
The pupils don’t care about Auckland house prices, the ramifications of Brexit or debtto-income ratios.
They care about transport. In particular, they care about English’s transport. They ask if English rides in a limo, if he has a private jet, if he travels much, if he stays in motels.
They ask what someone has to do to become Prime Minister and he replies, drily, “just wait long enough”.
In a moment of honesty, he tells them he had tried to get there before in 2002. “Then they decided, probably correctly, that I wasn’t good enough so they gave the job to someone else.”
English was at the school from 1967 to 1974 when he went to Wellington for secondary school. There was no playground and they played bullrush. The kids these days, he says, have got it too easy.
His weekly treat was a 5 cent cream bun while he did the family banking. This, he says, was “complete freedom”.
The nuns are no longer in charge but in English’s time, the principal was Sister Gregory: “a short old nun.” English was terrified of her.
He never played pranks on the nuns. “Oh no. Nuns were scary. And holy.”
He remembers it as “a Catholic island in a sea of Protestantism”.
“Those sort of differences were quite significant then.”
That was the 1960s and 70s. “Things impacted here. In the Catholic church I can remember my parents and their friends having robust arguments about what was changing, what was too liberal and what was not. Their kids were starting to do things — my older brothers and sisters — so there was discussion about what the children should be doing and not doing.”
He did get into some fights. The workers on the Manapouri dam project were in town at that time.
“The kids from the hydro village were hard kids. They liked fighting. [We fought] over who tackled who, who was in front of who.” The nuns turned a blind eye — to a point. “They were watchful, but they didn’t get concerned about it the way people would now.”
The winner, he says, was “whoever had the numbers.”
There were three or four of the English boys there then. “We had to stick together — the brothers.”
They give things plain names down in Southland. Winton has a Middle Pub and a Top Pub. Bottom Pub closed a while ago. The store in Middle Bush between Winton and Dipton is called ‘The Store.’
Understatement is also something of a regional affliction. But the true extent of it comes clear when it comes to White Hill.
Two journalists have been invited to Dipton as part of a “getting to know Bill” exercise.
There’s a whole other “getting to know Andrew” thing going on over the other side of town so competition is hot.
English is treating it as an extreme sport.
Item one on Saturday is a walk at 7am up to the White Hill Wind Farm. The ‘hill’ is no hill. It is of Himalayan proportions. English is fit as a buck rat. He shoots off into the distance.
Two of his protection squad members are there on alert for rogue sheep and making jokes about running boot camps for journalists so they can keep up with English in the campaign.
By the time we’re half way up I’d much rather get to know Andrew Little.
By the time we reach the top I recall the editor’s demand for “fear and loathing in Dipton” and reflect the loathing part is building a great head of steam.
English is gracious enough not to rub it in too much and at the top, we watch him stride manfully through the tussock for his own promotional video.
We admire the view of all the flat land below on which we could just as easily have gone for a morning walk.
This sort of thing is probably not gratifying for English either.
The indignities of what is expected of a PM are becoming apparent. He’s even had wife Mary discussing his teenage acne in the NZ Women’s Weekly.
English has long kept his life private but says he knows people want to know more about the Prime Minister they haven’t yet had a chance to vote for.
“In the long run people will vote on whether the National Government is doing a good job and whether they trust the Prime Minister or not.
“But they have a new Prime Minister, I have a different background and I’ve found they’re interested in it.”
So here we are being taken to school and talked through the family history — the limestone cliff which saw Mary mount a crusade to save it from the fertiliser works, the field English’s great grandfather Richard pitched his tent, the place English almost got shot by someone who took exception to the English brothers moving stock.
It was once hard to move around Dipton without tripping over an English. Five generations have farmed there in the 126 years since great grandfather Richard stopped running supplies from the West Coast to the Otago gold mines and bought the farm land.
Now only one branch of the family still lives there full time — English’s nephew Louis who runs the farm with his wife and three preschool children.
The farm is English’s refuge but even there he can’t escape voters moaning about government policy.
Like many others in Southland, Louis has Filipino workers and the Government has made it harder to get and renew visas for them.
“Kiwis first,” Louis says. “It’s just there are no Kiwis down here.”
In Bill English’s day, the workers were the family but