Barbara Ewing - One Minute Crying Time

IN NEW ZEALAND IN THE 1950s it was very expensive to make a telephone call from one part of the country to another. Toll calls, we called them. And the price of making a telephone call to another country in those years was prohibitive. It cost 1 per minute when I first arrived in London to telephone, or to be telephoned from, New Zealand, and I was living on about 5 per week. I was a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and my 5 per week had to cover rent and board and tube fares and tomato soup for lunch. So I kept in touch with friends and family by letter (and got into the habit of sticking their photographs on the walls of wherever I was living).

But one of the New Zealand telephone operators I had got to know earlier when I was sent away to the South Island a euphemism in those days for pregnant unmarried girls being dealt with, although in this case I was simply being sent away to the South Island told me that the overseas operators (who connected calls manually in those long-ago days) had to stay on the line to make sure the connection was not lost. An agreement had to be made with the operator beforehand as to how long the call would be: it was conventionally three minutes. And as these expensive phone calls were almost always made only when it was a matter of life, or death, or heartbreak, the listening New Zealand operators who had to interrupt to say, Im sorry but your time is up were informally permitted to allow, as well as the three minutes, one minute crying time.

Today, with certain twenty-first-century technological and financial arrangements, I can phone for as long as I like from or to either country, and am permitted to cry or laugh (hopefully without anyone listening in, though who knows) for free.

MONDAY 1 JANUARY 1951

Stayed up on New Years Eve to sing Auld Lang Syne at midnight. Drank ginger ale with Mum and Dad and Andrew. Ross was asleep. Tonight we left Wellington for Timaru. A calm night. We are sailing across Cooks Strait on the Rangatira.

TUESDAY 2 JANUARY 1951

Landed at Lyttleton at 7am. Caught train to Christchurch. It was cold. Caught train to Timaru. We have got a house for us to stay in near where Nana and Granny live. It is very old-fashioned but nice. It has a poem over the lavatory. We saw Sound Shell concert at Caroline Bay. A fireworks display was very beautiful. Rockets were let off.

SATURDAY 6 JANUARY 1951

Saw Nana and Granny. Andrew and Ross and I gave them a concert with our gazoos. Then went on merry-go-round, Big Wheel and chair-o-plane. Went for two swims. Saw Sound Shell concert. There were 2 Lady singers, 2 Men singers, 1 Guitar player, 1 Accordian player, 1 Tap Dancer and 2 Irish Dancers. And a Clown. There was a Nigger Minstrel Show before we came. Miss Caroline Bay was picked. It was Miss Catherine Jones, Balclutha. She intends to spend the 50 prize on an electric sewing machine.

SUNDAY 14 JANUARY 1951

My twelfth birthday! Dad and the boys gave me a Royal Family book and a cake of choc. Mummy gave me a brooch. Nana gave me a card and soap and powder and a bowl. I also got a writing pad, rubber, envelopes and Minties. And choc and lollies from Cousin Jack. We had a party tea. Then played paper games after tea with Dad.

FRIDAY 19 JANUARY 1951. BEST DAY

Went to Temuka in Rental Car to Uncle Johns farm. Was on Betty the pony most of the time, trying to ride, also Uncle John milked the cows. He showed us how to put hens to sleep. He twirled them round with their heads under their wings. Then he put them on the ground and they were asleep. When they woke up they looked very surprised and sqwarked. Had a sing song before we went home.

SUNDAY 21 JANUARY 1951

Went to the Timaru Botanical Gardens in the afternoon while Dad and Mum took Nana and Granny for a ride. Met them at the Gardens and had an ice-cream. Granny is Dads grandmother. Granny is nearly 100. She is deaf and so we shout to her. She talks funny. It is Scotland. Played Paper Games after tea. Tomorrow before we go home will change my birthday Royal Family book to Princess Margaret in Italy.

That poem over the lavatory in that rented house: I still remember it. We three kids thought it was very funny and rude (over a lavatory!) and we laughed and recited it to one another when no one was listening:

IF YOUVE GOT A JOB TO DO, DO IT WELL .

IF ITS ONE YOU WISH WAS THROUGH, DO IT WELL .

Once upon a time, so long ago and (some would say) so far away, as we set off to visit my fathers family, including his sisters, his mother and his grandmother in the South Island of New Zealand, I about to turn twelve and about to start my last year at primary school started to keep a daily diary. Millions trillions of people keep diaries and journals recording their lives; who knows how many may have started before they were twelve and not missed one single day for 2400 days, but I was one of them. On the 2401st day I stopped, unable to write. I was then eighteen years old.

After that it became a journal, which I have never stopped writing. Until now.

THERE IS A MORI EXPRESSION , karanga mate, which means to call death. And there is an old Mori belief: if you wrote a will, like the white men wrote wills: karanga mate.

When my husband, a New Zealand Mori, died and like his parents before him died without leaving a will (I know he too a lecturer in Mori tertiary education somewhere deep inside still believed in karanga mate), he left incalculable emotional, as well as legal, difficulties behind him.

After the long, sad, turmoiled days, I was finally on a twenty-seven hour flight back to London, crossing the world for what seemed like the thousandth time (but was perhaps about the 107th, and yes I do now worry about my carbon-dioxide footprint). Somewhere past Australia I was suddenly consumed with terror that the plane would crash, and my terror was not that I would die but that I would leave behind similar problems I had no up-to-date will. High, high up in the sky, clouds often turn bright red at dusk, red like fire. In the olden days fires used to be lit along the New Zealand coastline between villages, as warnings. I stared out at the fire and felt my heart beating fast as the plane sped on and into the interminable dark night.

In London I immediately set about the task of, as they say, putting my affairs in order. And among my goods and chattels I had drawers and drawers of those old fading diaries and journals, and the only sensible thing to do with them was to burn them. I live in a London attic but some friends offered to make a bonfire at the bottom of their large garden.

As I was packing the diaries into cardboard boxes to take away for burning, I glanced at one or two of the very early ones

Terrible forms of torture in my Wellington suburban street in 1951 (apart from hard pinching) were horse bites and Chinese burns. Re-reading some of the old, very first, diaries has sometimes been like having a horse bite or a Chinese burn inside my head. Who in their right mind could bear to read, let alone enable anyone else to read, any of their adolescent, sentimental, excessive, self-obsessed writing? dont be ridiculous.

But: one of my professions, in one of my countries, is Writer of Historical Novels. I therefore am slightly obsessive about finding old papers and letters and records concerning the people I am writing about: they are so often very revealing and occasionally genuinely exciting. (I stood up with a red face shouting WHAT? in the British Library when I was researching for a novel that became