Chance Is a Fine Thing by Philip Temple

Author:Philip Temple [Philip Temple]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781775531562
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

At our 1969 election party, there was a guest I would not have dreamed of being there just two months earlier: my 20-year-old brother Stephen. While I was at work one day in September, Daphne rang me to say that he had turned up on the doorstep, unannounced, after working his passage here on a ship.

When we moved to Wellington, it became clear to my mother that we would not be travelling back to the UK in the foreseeable future, and our letters became filled with the pros and cons of all three of them coming out to New Zealand. The letters became tiresomely repetitive as she sought the kind of emotional reassurances she needed to make the big shift. I endeavoured to be encouraging yet objective about how she would find New Zealand. It was all to do with how she would find it: the only references to my stepfather concerned his prospects of finding work. I was wary of encouraging them too much: it was a decision they had to make for themselves, their future, not with the central idea of ‘reuniting’ the family. After the emotional stresses surrounding our wedding, and a separation of more than ten years, I had no idea how I would respond to my mother face to face. I knew I would resist any attempt at emotional manipulation and that the welfare of my family, and the life I had worked out for myself, would come first. As Stephen wrote, cryptically, to her, ‘He certainly has changed a lot.’

Stephen stayed with us for six months. He walked into a job at a truck assembly plant in Petone and got himself a car. We did our best to help him settle and I took him on a trip north when we climbed Mount Egmont. He needed no encouragement from me: almost at once he realised he had arrived in the right place. A month after arriving, he wrote home, ‘From what little of New Zealand I have seen so far, I don’t think I’d leave. Or if I did I’m sure I would come back. It is a fabulous place.’ At Easter 1970, Stephen decided to go north to Taupo, following a girl and a better job. He is still there, a successful builder, after marrying in 1976 and bringing up a family of three.

The underlying purpose of Stephen’s journey out was to test the water for my mother and stepfather. When it was clear he would stay, they decided to emigrate, too, and arrived at the end of 1970. The tone of my mother’s letters, which provoked even Daphne to anger and remonstration, warned of a difficult reunion.

From the moment she stepped off the plane in Wellington, my mother was in a bad mood. It had been a long, tiring journey, principally using charter flights, the cheapest option. She was sceptical and critical of everything she found but had already decided to live in Wellington, as close to us as possible. Daphne was generous and welcoming but there was little rapport between my mother and the children.

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