Unreliable old memories
Tom Hunt recalls a maze of summers long gone.
Iremember the house well – the cavernous hallway, the dark wooden table, the steps to the front door and the paddock outside. But I don’t know if I remember it at all.
I moved out of that house beside the Pauatahanui inlet when I was 2 years old. Memories of riding a trolley at breakneck speed down the hall probably have little to do with reality.
I remember Christmas Days of the 1980s when I was older – 9, perhaps – waiting on Aro St for my father and his car being the only one up the road in an hour.
And unwrapping a present – a two-tone grey breakdancing tracksuit – then posing for a photo with it astride a cannon on top of Mt Victoria.
And Christmas Days at my grandparents’ with the three children – my two cousins and I – taking turns handing out presents from under the tree.
Then later singing We Are the World with Angela on the piano. I could sing then about as well as I do now and got the Bob Dylan part. I still cringe to think about it.
And there were summer holidays that lasted forever. Like one summer holidays when I insisted on wearing, and never washing, ripped jeans and a black sleeveless T-shirt with the words, ‘‘we came, we saw, we f ..... ’’
With absolute clarity, I recall falling off my cousin’s bike and knocking myself out the day before I
turned 5. I remember exactly where I was and what the bike looked like as I lay on the ground. Then, my father arriving at hospital the next morning with my fifth birthday present – a Panther Stud bike.
But none of the memories can possibly be real – at least not entirely. Unless the laws of physics was different in 1981, the bike can’t possibly have stood by itself as I lay on the ground, and the hospital driveway I remember does not, and never did, exist.
We Are the World was released in 1985, when I was 9 and surely considered myself too cool for such nonsense. It was a full year after the movie Beat Street came out and I was a bad-ass breakdancer then.
I suspect most memories before I was 10 have been corrupted over the years – a surreal blend of what I wished happened, what I was told happened, with fragments of other memories mixed in – and somewhere in there possibly a dash of what actually happened.
But some memories – now more than 35 years old – I can still recall with perfect clarity.
Walking in for my first day of school and sitting on the mat while Miss Herbert taught, then asking a question, is fresh in my mind.
But the following four years are all but a mystery.
Photos of birthday parties suggest I had friends but I now have no idea who they were.
I remember a child arriving at school from Pitcairn Island and now can only wonder what horrors he left behind on the paedophilic island.
I can’t remember much learning at primary school, although the fact I am able to write these words seems to suggest I paid some attention.
The school building I remember burning to the ground is curiously still standing today – looking a bit tatty but unscathed.
I know this because my almost8-year-old son now goes to the same school. Not much has changed there, though. His classroom is in what was once a shed and the swimming pool is now an empty shell.
There is no longer a cane hanging behind the principal’s desk but now I’m not sure if there ever was.
The adventure playground I raised funds to build – and created my own, dismissed design with roller coasters and water slides for – was past its use-by date when we did our first school visits three summers ago. In the summer before he was about to start, it got torn down.
The lower branches of the macrocarpa I could once easily climbed to the top of are now too high to reach.
There are the surreal titbits from primary school: Tristan Alley’s limerick skills, that black and dark blue crayons were impossible to tell apart, and the day someone turned up to school in 1987 with the new cassette of Michael Jackson’s Bad.
True memories – ones I can put into context – start when I was about 10 when, with absolute certainty, I was destined to become a professional skateboarder.
As often as possible – and 10-yearold boys have a lot of spare time – my best friend and I would head down to Penny Farthing Cycles on Courtenay Place to plan our skateboarding careers.
Christmas Day arrived and we got the skateboards. Mine was an Edwards Black Magic, although for years – down to the spray-painted style lettering – I thought it was Black Magie.
Black Magie met an unfortunate end under a large rock one day and I upgraded to boards not likely to find themselves beneath a large rock dropped by me.
Soon I could do some tricks but it soon became clear that my stepfather was right – I was increasingly unlikely to turn pro.
In any case, it was a new decade – the 1990s – and I was off to high school. Soon skateboarding was the last thing from my mind and I swapped my last skateboard for an oversized pair of green jeans.
Wellington in the 1980s had been a drab sort of town. Cuba St’s bucket fountain was about as exciting as it got and photographs of the time show an overcast town, where people in long grey coats ran between red buses.
But in all my memories – lying concussed in the hot sun, Christmases, even toddling out the front door to a paddock I now don’t know if it existed – the sun always shone.
‘‘I suspect most memories before I was 10 have been corrupted over the years .’’