Let’s make sure everyone has opportunities

grant.shimmin@fairfaxmedia.co.nz

I’m not sure I remember exactly how Mum used to say it, though she said it often. It was something along the lines of ‘‘you don’t realise how lucky you are to have the opportunities you have’’.

I didn’t really get it at the time. I was young, the opportunities I had were something I guess I took for granted.

It’s almost as though I assumed they were there for everybody, because my peers, the kids I went to school with, in a society we were all initially too naı¨ve to realise was divided on multiple fronts, were in the same boat.

Reflecting now, I realise Mum’s comments traversed to a degree the opportunities she’d never had, as one of five kids in a family without much money.

Her Dad was a butcher, and I can remember him in my early days – he died when I was not quite 9 – talking about being ‘‘poor’’ during his working life; though poverty would have been a relative concept in apartheid-era South Africa.

I do know Mum and her siblings didn’t get the chance to finish school, or contemplate tertiary education, so she was clearly touching on that. But I think she was also alluding to the fact that there were other kids who wouldn’t have had the opportunities it was simply assumed by us we would.

Both my parents made references, when our fussy eating habits came out, to ‘‘starving children’’. I can remember Dad saying there were ‘‘people who don’t know where their next meal’s coming from’’, but I always had the impression they were in far-flung lands, not potentially a few kilometres up the road.

For them, wherever they were, the opportunity to survive another day or two was realistically all they were focused on. It took me years to realise how close to home some of them were.

A couple of things really drove me to reflect on opportunities this week.

In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s an election on. I was going to add ‘‘next week’’, but really, it’s on now, and more and more people are voting each day.

No, I’m not planning to vote for The Opportunities Party, for reasons I won’t go into here, but it did strike me that whoever came up with its name, be it Gareth Morgan or someone else, should be congratulated, because it captures something of what an election really should be about.

Opportunities certainly have been front and centre in the buildup, and I believe it’s partly the fact that some of the opportunities people want were things previous generations took for granted – the chance to buy an affordable home, or simply be adequately housed, the ability to feed their kids nutritiously, to get them a decent education, to send them to uni or polytech – that has driven the preelection debate.

The other thing that inspired my thinking was revisiting the roots of my deep love of reading.

A few weeks ago, a discussion about that subject drove me to look for the first ‘‘real’’ book I’d read as a youngster. Between us, my partner and I couldn’t find it, but a week or so ago she told me she’d stumbled across my childhood Famous Five collection, by Enid Blyton, which somehow made its way here from South Africa and has since traversed much of the country.

This week I found it, Five On Finniston Farm, number 18 in the series of 21.

I don’t know exactly why I chose to get that one, but I was about 7, it was school holidays, and Mum bought it for me from our local newsagent.

I devoured it. I think Dad was away on business, and I was allowed to stay up to finish it that same night, lying in my parents’ bed and reading by the light of Mum’s bedside lamp while she was working on something nearby.

I remember my wide-eyed excitement, telling Mum I’d worked out how to correctly read the word ‘‘anxious’’, which I was proud of since I’d never seen it in print before. A day or two later, I borrowed Five Run Away Together, number 3, from the girl next door and finished it by nightfall. I was hooked, not just on the Five – it’s amazing the dangerous situations such young people were allowed to confront without adult supervision – but on reading generally, and I haven’t looked back. I don’t think there’s a more important learned life skill.

The thing is, it’s dawned on me how truly fortunate I was to have that opportunity, not only to get that first book, but to carry it forward from there, without ever having to question the ability to keep up the ‘habit’, whether through visiting the library or acquiring more books, magazines, or other reading material by other means. I was privileged.

I took it for granted then, an activity that played a huge role in shaping me, but I realise, with an election on, that there are many kids, not in far-flung lands but possibly up the road, who don’t have the opportunity I had. And I really want every kid to have it.

I’m going to delve back into those Fives for old time’s sake, and then try to find a way they can help a child, or children, in discovering the life-changing joy of reading.

Keeping them for the grandkids? Well, they’re a few years off, I reckon, and if I finally put my head down and just get stuck in, maybe I could write my own modern New Zealand-based series for them, channelling the adventurous imagination of Enid Blyton.

Besides which, I’m sure there are other kids who’d really love the opportunity to read them now.