Back to the fair in the neighbouring township. Alan drove me there at about ten in the morning and arranged to meet me in the early afternoon, when he would return with Joan. I walked the last part of the way as the central area was crammed with stalls selling everything from pottery to tapa cloth, by way of other arts and crafts from around the country and the Pacific islands.
The sun was hot and rising high. Only the small, round grassy section in the main square gave any shade. A pipe band stood close by, sometimes marching while they played, with a woman banging the big drum strapped to her, while youngsters with side drums wielded their sticks adroitly, in unison.
Eventually, I found a seat at the sole picnic table. Someone else sat down too, and said something to me. “That’s a fine Scottish accent you have,” I commented, not quite sure what he had said.
“I’ve been here forty-two years,” he replied without a trace of anything south of Glasgow in his voice.
He told me he’d been back to Scotland recently and was mistaken by a phone caller for his brother, who had never left the land of his birth. The caller refused to believe he was just visiting from New Zealand, convinced the brother was trying to pull his leg.
When I returned to Alan and Joan’s house that evening after a walk and a picnic meal, Joan was sitting at a table on the patio with a young couple who had moved in next door, but who I initially took for paying guests. The man, I later found out, was of Fijian descent and was armed with a number of cans of beer, one of which he offered me, prompting my usual explanation that it was on my banned list, along with coffee and dairy products.
There was also a young man and woman from the Czech Republic. She was not yet twenty-one. Her name was Jana, but in New Zealand she called herself Jane. He was David, and much taller than his slender girlfriend. They had come to the area to pick apples for three months, but were going to stay for a year.
Two other guests were at a wedding in Wellington and didn’t return until the rest of us had gone to bed. Long before then we were joined by Alan — and his bottle of home distilled rum, or whiskey. I asked innocently whether it was legal to have your own still and was assured, not only by Neil but also the Fijian neighbour, that it was perfectly OK. Of course, it isn’t. Alan produces firewater with an alcohol content of eighty-six per cent (!), then dilutes it to forty-three.
David, the young Czech, had a half-full bottle of Irish whiskey on the table and Jana drank not only from that but also accepted some of Neil’s brew when offered. Joan had told me earlier that Neil had to drink — and smoke — because of a serious injury as a helicopter pilot. And with quite a lot of alcohol inside him, he became very talkative, telling me in a low voice across the table about his past career.
He was brought up on a local farm, evidently a large and flourishing one for it had its own Tiger Moth plane, which Alan learnt to fly at the age of twelve! Flying on your own property was not covered by the regulations, which anyway seemed to be extremely lax. He went on to tell me about the time when he was flying DC3s in Canada, spraying crops in formation with others, who did everything wrong until he pointed out their errors to the man in charge, a former Spitfire pilot in the Second World War.
He also spoke at length about his time flying helicopters, hunting deer in dangerous country, flying low in deep ravines. He called it ‘the wild west’. Farmers could fire shotguns at them and shatter the windscreen. Neil had a ‘shooter’ on board and a winch-man, with an extremely hazardous job. When deer were shot, he was lowered to gut the carcasses before getting them winched up. Neil said they lost I think it was four men and two pilots during his time in this most precarious occupation before he came a cropper himself.
Apart from taking potshots at them, farmers might stretch a wire across the gully and one day he flew straight into one, losing or severely damaging the rotor blades and coming down with a crash. Joan told me he had been put in a body bag and it was a miracle that he survived. But the misadventure hadn’t cured him from wanting to fly helicopters again, albeit for the less hazardous task of showing visitors the surrounding countryside.
