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Previous | Contents | Next § 10 August 1980: The Air Nauru flight is turbulent, flying through cloud most of the time. The hostess is generous, giving us a cooked breakfast when we ask for extra sandwiches. Nauru is more grey drizzle. The runway is as long as the island is wide and the jet has to brake…
Sunda Kelapa 1992, Peter Connolly photos § This wasn’t our first visit to Indonesia. We’d spent a couple of days in Bangkok on a round the world adventure in 1980, and a few weeks on Bali a bit after that. I’d also had a week or two’s work trip on Java — now, that was…
Previous | Contents | Next Assisi, and only two days to go before we head home. The six bottles of wine to absorb into my luggage have been making me think about packing, but then the thought arises that I might never see this again — better wait ’til the sun sets. I don’t rhapsodise…
Previous | Contents | Next As we drove through a pass we saw two shadowy green tanks on a groomed hillside, and then, on the other side of the road, a group of parked motorcycles decked out in military dun in front of a cemetery. We stopped out of curiosity. This was the Italian Military…
Previous | Contents | Next We wasted the morning rather disastrously. First we spent ages looking for the Commonwealth War Cemetery — and drove into a kerb while doing so, bending the wheel rim of our poor little car and damaging the plastic hub cap, which fell off. We got to the cemetery, where we…
Previous | Contents | Next In the Hotel bar at breakfast an elderly, vocal little man in jeans was sounding forth exuberantly to a group of Germans and gesturing to Monastery Hill, which we could see through the windows. It was probably his volubility that prompted another German, courtly but crippled — we’d seen him…
Previous | Contents | Next Next day we were all dressed up for the Commonwealth Service at the Cemetery we had visited previously. I had rung to confirm arrangements beforehand with the New Zealand contingent and we turned up in the maelstrom on time at 9.30. It was crowded with veterans and supporters from most of the Commonwealth participants,…
Previous | Contents | We’d managed to lock our keys in the car at the Cemetery. I decided the easiest way to deal with this was to let Avis worry, so we looked out the local office to explain. Two nice young guys were shutting up for lunch. How could you do that? they wanted to know. Eh,…
Previous | Contents | Next Our part-time jobs didn’t help. Heather’s was as a dental assistant, and that leather handbag she made for her Mum at Ruapehu Street was the first glimmer of her handcraft career. My first job was in the Auckland Hospital IVS unit, as I’ve already mentioned. My second, later I think,…
Previous| Contents| Next I can only remember two teachers at Hikurangi Primary. Mr Manktelow’s class room was a converted church hall up the road from the school. We learnt the alphabet and our times tables by reciting them together in class. I liked him in a subordinate kind of way — although he did strap…