by David Tyler (Urban Wronski)

---

The ship was in for a refit. HMNZS Kaniere, a Loch-class frigate salt-hardened from Korean waters and Pacific patrols, had come back to Devonport dockyard at HMNZS Philomel needing attention, and while the dockyard men did their work, her crew were ashore. Technically, a Petty Officer of the Royal New Zealand Navy drawing his service pay was Crown property. King’s Regulations, which the RNZN followed in all their ancestral rigour, did not permit a serving rating to take outside paid employment. Not without permission. Not without the kind of paperwork that would have made the whole arrangement visible to people for whom visibility was precisely what you wished to avoid.

Hence the stealth. Hence the bicycle.

My father would be home by four and away again up the hill before the light changed: up the south end of Hillary Crescent in that characteristic side-to-side wobble of his, past Pam Child’s place, past the Ford Prefect belonging to Les Child and the balloon-nosed early Holden across the road belonging to the De La Rues, past the procession of pre-war relics puffing clouds of blue oil smoke because their rings were worn practically transparent, the battered diff whining and the odd whap, whap of a badly patched tyre or a cheap retread coming adrift as they did. Lots of horn tooting, because that was the era. My father would toot at complete strangers just for a laugh, and complete strangers would wave back, saying to each other: well, that’s old Gummie, or Basil, or Bert. He had cracked the code of performance bonhomie well before America made it compulsory in federal politics, until it became so popular and so much fun that everyone forgot anything else that mattered and just traded away the hours on the hail-fellow-well-met bullshit of ersatz camaraderie. The whole street was fragrant with exhaust and Castrol grease and the particular tang of an era learning to drive. Up the hill and then gone. Not down toward the naval base but across, taking the bicycle track that cut from the top of the crescent across the sewage pipe that carried a right of way over the Ngataringa Bay mudflats. What looked like the back of beyond was in fact a tidal paradise: oyster-catchers and godwits working the mud in the long Auckland light, the mangroves holding the edge of things, the bay opening out toward Bayswater and the Waitematā beyond.

Down to Bayswater Wharf, where the ferry had been running since 1910 and still crossed in eight minutes to the foot of Queen Street. A double-ended vessel with a saucer-shaped bottom built for shallow water, crabbing across the prevailing westerlies, sometimes listing badly as a full load of passengers crowded the sheltered side. Across the harbour to Queens Wharf, that great concrete finger built from 1907 to 1913: five cargo sheds, the whole organised machinery of an export nation loading its butter and its wool and its meat into the holds of British ships. He would have arrived as the city was still at work and left when it was done, the ferry home across the dark water, the bicycle track back across the sewage pipe, Hillary Crescent quiet in the evening, the hook back in the shed, the family none the wiser and the navy entirely so.

He was not, technically, a wharfie. He was a seagull, the term the watersiders gave to any casual who picked up the little bits of work that became available, registered with the Port Employers Association but with no guaranteed hours, no continuity, just the shape of a man arriving at the right moment. It suited him. A Petty Officer who had served on ships that shelled North Korean gun emplacements and escorted convoys through waters where submarines operated on political instructions: he knew how to move without making a noise. The hook was what he used on the wharf, that beautiful forged thing he had made with his own hands at Philomel, on the same naval base whose regulations he was now circumventing. Poetic, in its way.

To this day I have no idea what he actually did in those holds. He came home with tins of things, fruit mostly, sometimes fish, that had fallen through broken nets. It was organised petty crime of the most civilised kind, turned a blind eye to by all parties as a matter of long custom. A man had first dibs on what broke out of a net. Men were killed in the holds too, by shifting loads and misfired derricks, and the official record kept its language flat: no blame attachable to anyone, as though the man had mislaid himself among the cargo. It was secret men’s business. My father’s silence on the subject was its own kind of eloquence.

But in the right time and the right place, and when inspecting the innards of a flagon or six of DB Waitemata, that clear, sparkling Auckland lager brewed by the Coutts family out at Ōtāhuhu, a beer so improbably bright it had been startling people since before the war, my father was fluent in the language of the wharf. The stories came out then, in the sitting room, passed around with the warm flagon, while their wives stirred bushels of wet washing in the coal-fired copper in the wash-house you had to go through after the back door. The ex-servicemen recognised each other the way veterans always do, with a private language built from shared extremity. What they had done in the war they did not speak of to civilians. What they had seen in the holds they did not speak of to their wives. They had the flagon and each other and that was sufficient.

He was still Navy, technically. He was saving for the deposit, the five per cent that the State Advances Corporation required before it would advance a mortgage at three per cent interest over forty years, an arrangement of almost surreal generosity by any subsequent measure. The deposit was the thing. That took the two jobs, the seagull shifts, the tins through the broken nets, the eight-minute ferry ride across the Waitematā in the dark, the bicycle track across the sewage pipe, Hillary Crescent quiet in the evening, and whatever else presented itself.

He was a romantic, my father, underneath all of it. The proof was planted right beside the front gate.

It was an apple tree. Not just any apple tree: a grafted apple tree, a single tree bearing seven different varieties, so that my mother would have an extended season from the heat of midsummer through to the cool of autumn. He had brought it home in a sugar bag hung over the front wheel of the cast-iron Hercules, perilously close to chafing through on the tyre, the whole precarious arrangement swaying with every rotation of that eternally snapping Sturmey-Archer cable. And riding on the crossbar, on a little wooden seat he had handcrafted himself, slats and brass bolts and butterfly nuts built like the end of a see-saw, was my five-year-old sister Barbara, squealing with glee for approximately the first two hundred yards, until the hard wood announced itself conclusively to the relevant anatomy and the glee became something else entirely.

The tree knew its business regardless. From January the Gravenstein came first, round and briefly perfect, the kind of apple that does not wait. Then Cox’s Orange Pippin in February, that freckled English immigrant, all aromatic sharpness and colonial good manners. Kidd’s Orange Red came close behind, bred right here in New Zealand by the orchardist J.H. Kidd himself, sweet and crisp and honey-tinged, tasting of somewhere the sun was always generous. Into March came the Golden Delicious and the Jonathan. Then in April the Granny Smith: acid-green, all self-sufficiency and argument, the one that kept longest and debated you while you ate it. And last of all, deep in autumn when everything else had finished, the Dougherty, what we children called the Dokkity, mangling the name with the cheerful imprecision of the young, greenish-yellow skin flushed and striped with red, sweet to the core, the one that ripened when the year was drawing in and made you glad the season was not over yet.

Seven varieties. One tree. A season of apples for a woman who deserved them, planted beside the front gate where the neighbour’s children could reach over the fence and help themselves, which they did, without hesitation and without remorse.

The hook hung in the shed. The Hercules leaned against the wash-house wall. The tree grew beside the front gate. And somewhere inside all three of these objects, the forged steel made at Philomel, the cast-iron bicycle with its eternally snapping cable, the improbable grafted tree that had swayed home in a sugar bag with Barbara squealing on the crossbar, was everything you needed to know about a man still in naval service, not quite yet in civvie street, building toward it one contraband shift at a time.

Coming back it was the Lucas dynamo whirring, and the headlamp’s amber glow feeling its way along the mudflats, that black cylindrical dome of a lamp shaped exactly like the perm hoods women in every suburban backyard were lowering over their rollers in those years, the packet perm being the great democratic beauty ritual of the age. The lamp threw just enough light to find the sewage pipe and the track home. Hillary Crescent. The shed. The hook back on its nail. Another shift done, another small increment toward a house he did not yet own, and seven kinds of apple coming on in the dark beside the front gate, quietly keeping their promise.