On
Ironside Road
Friday 18 August 2000
Where I lived from 2 to about 8 or 9.
One early morning I woke up before anyone else in the house and snuck outside and walked up the road to my friend Leigh's house and tapped on his bedroom window till he woke up and let me in.
I'd come home from school and my Dad would be pottering around in the garage, with the radio on — 2YA, listening to Parliament, or old music or something.
I had measles there once, and I remember sitting up in my bedroom with Dad sitting beside me and I saw the patterns on the wallpaper move and shimmer. My Dad didn't see them move.
And one time it rained very hard, and Mum let the three of us outside on the porch to watch the rain streaming down, and the rivulets coming down on the bank beside the path. She said it looked like Niagara Falls, and to us it did.
I saw a lizard once, but a big one, and it scurried away under a tree out by the end of the driveway.
We had a grass bank beside the house. My Aunt and Uncle bought me my first pair of rugby boots. They were plastic ones. I was so proud of them. I went outside and practised running up and down that grass bank, testing how well the sprigs worked.
In the cold Winter mornings I'd sit on top of the heater in the kitchen. One morning my dressing gown started to smoulder. My parents yelled at me for sitting there. They were worried, although as a kid you don't realise that.
And I had a friend home from school one day and we played rugby with in the living room, two small boys crashing around on the floor with a ball, and I fell and crashed my head through the glass on the china cabinet. And my Mother said “Wait until your Father gets home”
But most nights when he got home I'd sit on his knee while he told me a story. The same story about my friends and me riding our bikes down Nauranga Gorge and stopping to walk into the cave on the side of the hill halfway down. And I knew what the ending would be, and it was always the same, and I always jumped in delighted horror when he went “BOO!”
I woke up screaming one night with a nightmare, I was crawling around inside a cave filled with skulls and bones. And halfway through the nightmare there was a Felix the Cat cartoon that ran, just like an intermission in a movie.
There was an unsealed driveway beside our house, leading up a hill to some other houses. I used to ride my bike up to the top and hurtle down. One day I spotted some people walking up the road and wanted to impress them with how fast I could ride down the hill. I went very fast until I crashed in a heap at the bottom.
There used to be a neighbour who played the bagpipes. We could hear him some days, the sound drifting down and around.
It was a brick house on the corner of a road going up a hill. I have good memories from there.