Roll Back the Years

Te Ao Hou, June 1963, Page 9

Roll Back the Years by Rora ‘Hanah passed away today. Funeral Saturday.’ It was just a short telegram, but it took me back twenty-one years. That night I was on the all-night sleeper, headed south. Next morning I saw all the old familiar landmarks come into view, and I was filled with nostalgia. But my journey took me further on, to the place where my dear old relative was lying in state; for the next day or so, I was caught up in the ritual of a tangi and funeral, and met many dear folk that I had not seen for long years. We wept together as we remembered those dear ones who had passed on to the long sleep in Mother Earth, and we laughed together as we recalled many happy episodes of our youth. We talked about our families and our plans for them. We proudly counted our grand-children and discussed their names, and noted the modern tendency to dispense with the old family names (ingoa tupuna) in favour of European names; where the old names were called upon the children, we lovingly recalled the long-dead ones who had once borne these names. After the funeral was over we went around looking at other graves in the cemetery, and I marvelled at our almost universal neglect of our dead; there were some fine monuments rearing up out of fern and blackberry, discoloured now by the ravages of time, and others had grass and fern growing out of cracks and crevices. I wondered what would be the feeling of those souls, when they came forth at the command of Jesus, in that great day of His coming, and saw their neglected resting places. Then we left the cemetery and returned to the Pa, and after eating a meal we sat around on the Marae listening to the speeches and farewells of those who were making an immediate departure. Then, in company with my older sister and our brother and his wife, I left for a nearby city where I was to spend the night; and as we drove away from the Marae, I expressed my overwhelming desire to see again the home of our childhood, and looking with tears at the hills twenty miles off where our old home lay. So we travelled down that old road of my youth and saw again many of the homes I knew so well. Some sported a new coat of paint; many had new additions and new owners; some had disappeared, and were marked only by a few forlorn fruit trees and hedges. There was the old school, now acting as a hall, and there was the old home with the blue hydrangeas where the Infant Mistress always boarded; there was the old stream, flow-gently over the flat, in and out through the native trees—the same old stream where we had followed our mother as children dragging a flax line for eels. And so we travelled on, and the sun slipped down behind the hills, and dusk settled over the peaceful scenes. There was the old cream stop where we used to take our cream by gig, and I remembered how we used to play along the side planks of the old wooden bridge, now replaced by a wide concrete one. How I loved the bridges, and the thump, thump, thump, of the horses as they hurried across, for no matter how often a horse crosses a bridge, he never really trusts it. Then we came to the turnoff, where the lady of the house had kept Post Office, a tiny room

next to the bathroom where she sorted the mail; quite often I had helped her there. One of her sons still lived there, and I wondered if the lovely old peonie roses still grew along the front verandah. This was where we turned off to our old home, and my heart was full to overflowing as the years fell away—and I was once again a girl with my brothers on our ponies; remembering the exhilaration of standing up high in the stirrups, with the wind whistling through my hair, as I yodelled and sang at the top of my voice, galloping along on my pony. The hills that had seemed so high in my youth were now, strangely, not high at all, and the great gullies were only mild now. Soon we were drawing up at the old familiar gateway, under the same old pine tree, where we had played houses and swung on our favourite branches. Some dogs started to bark from their kennels behind the hedge—just where my Dad had once tied his dogs—some sheep across the gully made their old familiar sounds, and I stepped out of the car and walked away into the darkening night. I went towards the place where our cowbails, shed and stables used to be, but there was only one little bail behind the same old macrocarpa; the old stables, gig sheds and fodder sheds, were all gone. When I was at a safe distance from the others I sobbed aloud, great tears streamed unheeded down my cheeks, and I cried in anguish, ‘Oh Mother! Oh Father! if only you were here tonight, and I was coming back to you both, here in these old beloved surroundings and old familiar sounds.’ But they were several hundred miles away, sleeping side by side in a little hillside cemetery. The years fell away, and there we were again, a little family unit, in the place where we had been so close and so secluded, where no outside influences had been able to intrude, where every experience had been kept shining bright by the dew of memory; where we had run and rollicked and climbed the live-long day, where we loved to run through a field of waving and billowing oats, making tracks—to Father's dismay—where we had watched them reaping the harvest, and the men standing the stooks, and then the horses and drays bringing home the sheaves. How we loved to play hide and seek around those stacks on our ponies, whooping and colliding and waving sticks like red Indians! My brother asked if I wished to come up to the old house, as the inhabitants had issued a kind welcome; and so I stood once more in the old kitchen, and recognized many familiar things. I bit my lip and clenched my hands, as the kind young woman led us up the passage—there was my Mother's room—and the boys' room—and then we were out on to the old verandah, and there was Mother's pink fuchsia! ‘Oh please could I have just a little piece of this fuchsia!’ I asked, and I could feel those times crowding in and pushing away the present. I looked through the darkness at the familiar trees—the clothes line—the tarata tree, where I had my photo taken by two strange men who had called one day. I looked at the old familiar scene, and marvelled that things could change so little and yet so much. Gone was my husband and all our children, for they had no part with me in this, gone were the years between; for in these surroundings, I was in my childhood again. But I had to return, and soon I was thanking the young couple for so kindly accepting this intrusion; we shook hands, and went back the twenty miles to the city. All the way I was silent, for I had been into another world; I had said in my heart, ‘Roll back the Years’.