A mark in time

Husband-and-wife comedians and commentators Michele A’Court and Jeremy Elwood share their views.

It is remarkable how deeply some memories are etched. Maybe it’s the first ones that leave the strongest mark. This week, I was in my car listening to old radio reports from the Wahine disaster, and had to stop to find a paper bag to breathe into.

Everything sounded entirely familiar, though I don’t think I’d heard those voices in the 50 years since. Broadcasters’ professionalism barely masking the horror of what was unfolding, urgency seeping through the commentary. “The Wahine is rolling frightfully in the heavy swell in the harbour. Its list increases and then it goes back, but it never reaches perpendicular again.” It might have been the first time I’d heard grown men sound afraid.

I was 6 years old, nearly 7, and kept home from school, sick. Our family doctor made a house call (there’s a measure of time) with his hat and his leather bag. “That doesn’t sound good,” he said, tilting his head towards the radiogram where I lay listening under an eiderdown. My favourite spot – usually “Listen With Mother” or the Sunday request session or Danny Kaye records. Now it was bringing a different kind of story into our house.

Sixty miles from Wellington, the same storm was at our windows – which was scary enough. You could imagine being in the harbour with no eiderdown and no mother,

Tand no doctor coming to make you better.

It might have been the first time I learned to make personal connections to a news story. One of the women on the boat was travelling to visit my aunt in Wellington. For many hours, they couldn’t find her little boy and thought him lost. Imagine the joy when they found him. My mother says she could never make sense of it when he died just a few years later from something else. Did he escape death then only to be caught again? Or were those extra years a special gift?

Everyone knew someone, felt something. It would happen again – Erebus, Cave Creek, Pike River, the Christchurch quake – but that was my first experience of the world listing, and never quite reaching perpendicular again.

But also, it’s when I fell in love with real life storytelling – with radio first; then photography (that picture of the Wahine lying on its side in the newspaper delivered to our letterbox the next day – even bigger and sadder than I had made it in my head). And when I also fell in love with stories of real life heroes, and the way disasters – even near misses – make us feel connected, less alone.

Which is what this last week has been – a celebration not only of courage, but of doing things for each other even when you’re afraid. ragedies have a way of cementing moments in time. For my parents’ generation, it was knowing exactly where they were when they heard about the Kennedy assassination, for others it’s seeing the first images on September 11, or the Christchurch earthquakes, or Erebus.

I don’t have a personal memory of the Wahine disaster – I wasn’t living in New Zealand at the time, nor would I be living at all for another seven years. However, seeing the iconic images from that day can still have an effect, and I understand how much more powerful those memories are for those who lived through them.

For me, this year marks another anniversary of another tragedy, one I do have a closer relationship with. On December 21, 1988, Pan Am flight 103 was blown apart above the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 243 passengers, 16 crew, and 11 people on the ground.

A day or so later, my family and I drove north from Nottingham to catch the ferry from Stranraer in Scotland to Belfast, where my grandmother lived, for what would turn out to be our last Christmas there before emigrating to New Zealand.

The road went directly through Lockerbie.

When the wreckage of Pan Am 103 hit the town, it left a crater 47meters long through a residential street. That crater, and the accompanying debris, was painfully, indelibly visible as we drove through. My piano teachers’ fiancé had caught the flight last-minute in order to break the news of their engagement to her family in the US, in person. But the shocking sight of what had happened to that plane, and that street, is burnt into my memory 30 years on. It was perhaps my earliest realisation that evil actually exists, and has very real consequences.

It may sound glib, but last year Michele and I visited Universal Studios in Los Angeles, and part of the tour goes through a movie set from Steven Spielberg’s which depicts a plane crash in an urban street. All those memories came rushing back, even in such a benign environment.

So this week, as I read, heard and watched the stories of those involved in the Wahine, and their descendants, I recognised the need for memorials. To mark these anniversaries is to declare that we have not forgotten them. They remain a part of our history, and the lives they shaped, or indeed ended, are still amongst us today.

Because inevitably, there will be other tragedies. Nature – and “man’s inhumanity to man” – will ensure them. Other memories will be created, and carried by other generations. The least we can do is pay attention when they do.

Q