Witi Ihimaera - Native Son

At the end of 1959, aged fifteen, I sat School Certificate. I required two hundred marks from four subjects to pass, and thats what I managed. One mark less, and my life might have been entirely different.

The pass may have been the minimum, but as my headmaster Jack Allen said to Dad, shaking his hand vigorously as if he didnt quite believe it, Congratulations, Tom, well done. Not my hand, Dads.

Youd think Dad sat the examination, I said to my mother, Julia, as yet another local, queueing up, slapped him on the back.

Good on you, Tom, he said.

At that time, Te Karaka District High School was a rural school, which, looking back from the present, existed on the faraway edge of the decile, but a pass was a pass no matter how hopeless the hri or hick the town. Fifth-form School Certificate was as high as you could go as there was no sixth form. Anyway, that would be pushing your luck. Therefore, despite the usual ambitions I had in common with other boys, such as becoming a jet fighter pilot (we did have one in the family, my uncle Baden), my reality was that I would leave school and help Dad on the farm like Keith and David Wright on the landholding next to ours.

To be frank, although I had not taken to agricultural work as to the manner born, I was fond of farming. I dont know why as there was nothing romantic about working the land. Season after season, doing the same repetitive work. Buying the cheapest stock and hoping that cattle grown on sparse grass would bring maximum gain at the annual sales. In summer, mustering the sheep to move from one paddock to the other. Watching cattle dying in times of drought, that was hard to bear. Or losing lambs even after wed pulled them out of their mothers. Wed blow into their nostrils to help them breathe the chill air only to feel the slight shiver in their bodies, the sign of impending death.

Then there were the usual chores that my sisters and I had to do before we caught the school bus. We were up at five to light the fire, get the stove going and lay the table for breakfast. My sisters Kararaina, Twhi and Viki squabbled over who would take our baby brother Derek from his cradle, change his nappy and feed him. Meanwhile, morning and night, I shared milking, chopping wood, the occasional slaughtering of an animal for its mutton, and other heavier farm duties with my cousins Ivan, Miini, Kiki, Tom and Uenuku (Banana). And when we returned home from school in the afternoons, there were always other jobs to do: fencing, boiling offal for the dogs, daubing maggot-infested sheep with tar or tending the vegetable garden. Sometimes we did the work under instruction from Dad, Uncle and the grizzled old farmhand, Bulla, who had turned up one day looking for work and stayed. The three men were weaning us from their care, waiting for us to do the tasks whether they did or didnt ask for them to be done.