Pounamu Pounamu

Beginning of the Tournament

The phone rang just as I got back to the flat. It was Dad, ringing from Waituhi.

‘Hello, son,’ Dad said. ‘Are you coming home for Easter?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I answered but, even as I said the words, I could sense Dad’s disappointment. ‘It’s just that I’m broke at the moment,’ I continued, floundering for a reason. ‘If you give me a loan, I’ll give you the time.’

‘A loan?’ Dad laughed. ‘I’d rather put the money on a horse; at least that way I’ll have a chance of getting my money back.’

‘So what’s on in Waituhi?’

‘The Maori hockey tournament,’ Dad explained, offended. ‘Surely you haven’t forgotten that it’s Waituhi’s turn to host. I want you to come home and to help out. Not only that, but the Waituhi men’s team is short.’

‘Okay,’ I answered.

‘Can you bring a mate?’ Dad asked. ‘When I say our team is short, I mean it’s really short.’

‘Don’t you worry, Dad. I’ll see what I can do.’

Later that day I asked Jerry Simmons if he’d like to come home with me at Easter. Jerry was a Pakeha mate of mine who was a good hockey player. Actually, we were university students and had made plans to go with the university ski club at Easter to Mount Ruapehu. Jerry had visions of pulling a few women.

‘Every year the East Coast has a hockey tournament with a dance afterwards,’ I told him. ‘The teams come from all over the Bay.’

I could tell Jerry was disappointed at this change in plan. ‘I didn’t know you blokes had separate tournaments,’ he said.

‘For tennis, rugby and golf too,’ I answered. ‘As far as my family is concerned, though, the hockey tournament is the most important. The supreme trophy in the men’s competition is for my grandmother’s shield.’

‘How big a tournament is it?’

‘Well …,’ I began, uncomfortably, ‘once upon a time the tournament used to attract over fifty teams, but big Maori events have been declining in our area for some time. As more and more people leave for the cities there’s less and less people at home. We don’t always go back. We’re probably down to around twenty-five teams that still arrive for the hockey though. I guess that makes the tournament more important than it ever was. Anyway, you’ll see when you get there.’

‘I haven’t said I’m coming yet! Don’t rush me, don’t rush me.’

‘I’ve got a terrific looking sister,’ I said, giving Jerry a wink. That did the trick. I had told Jerry a lot about Mere and how pretty she was. Anyone would know by just looking at me, that any sister of mine would be pretty: I’m quite a handsome fella myself. But I hoped Jerry wouldn’t be too wild with me when he met Mere.

Easter came and, although Jerry moaned about not going to Mount Ruapehu, we started off in the car for Waituhi. It was a long journey and, as I’d been out rather late the night before, I wasn’t in the best of moods when Jerry began pestering me about Mere.

‘Is she really pretty? Is she really pretty?’ he kept asking.

I got so sick of it I couldn’t resist teasing him. ‘She’s terrific,’ I answered. ‘She’s tall for her age, but not as tall as you. Good figure, long legs, eyes that smile right at you, and a mouth that’s just waiting to be kissed.’

As I was describing Mere, however, I began to realise, hey, Jerry was a bit of an animal. No way would I ever want any woman I knew, no matter what age she was, to even be in the same room with him.

‘She hasn’t got a boyfriend already, has she?’

‘Come to think of it,’ I answered, backing off, ‘I think there might be somebody who’s got his eye on her.’

Did Jerry get the joke? Nah. When he met Mere he gave me a dirty look. She was seven, and Jerry saw her playing with her dolls when Dad opened the door.

‘So you came,’ Dad said, as if he hadn’t been too sure I would. ‘I thought you might have been studying too hard or having too good a time down there in Wellington.’ My father was like the sky above me, wide open, embracing, filling my life with sunlight. There’s so much love between us, and I regretted the earlier hesitation about coming. Yes, Dad, I was studying hard and having a good time. But you called and I came.

I forgot all about Jerry until he pounced on me after dinner. ‘I should have known better than to trust you! Good figure, huh! Long legs, long hair, a mouth just waiting to be kissed!’

‘Easy on! Take it easy, Jerry! I was only joking. Wait. Where will violence get you? Wait! Listen, Jerry! I’ve got this fantastic looking cousin and …’

But Jerry wasn’t going to be taken twice. He was really sorry though when he discovered that this time I was actually telling the truth.

The next morning I woke at dawn and went up to the family graveyard to pay my respects to my kuia, Nani Miro. She had died at the end of winter. Somebody had stuck an Ace of Hearts onto her grave, and small windmills whirred brightly with the wind. Then I saw Dad waving from the homestead and went to join him.

‘Miro would have been pleased that you came home to help out,’ Dad said. ‘I’ve had to take on a lot of the responsibilities she had for Waituhi. And somebody —’ he nudged me hard, to make sure I took the hint — ‘will have to take it on when I go. Never forget your obligations to your family and to your iwi.’

We had breakfast, I helped Dad sort out the programme for the day and, because Jerry was still sleeping, we left him to get breakfast started for the visitors at Takitimu Hall. Dad stayed there while I went to finish marking up the grounds where the hockey games would be played. By the time Jerry arrived, quite a few of the bystanders had joined me and some of the teams were practising. Jerry had polished his boots and put on his socks and shorts. When he saw the hockey grounds he was horrified.

‘Is this it?’

‘Yes, Jerry.’

‘You mean this … this paddock?’

‘Yes, Jerry.’

An hour later, Jerry was still wandering around, dazed. I’d begun introducing him to the multitude of my relatives and there was not a white one in sight. The buses had started to arrive from Takitimu Hall and the tournament was gradually gaining some semblance of order. A tent had been put up in the paddock, and my Auntie Annie was doing great business selling soft drinks and lollies to the local kids.

‘You should have warned me,’ Jerry said. He cast a gloomy eye over the crowd. They all seemed to be wearing gumboots or old dresses, balaclava hats, holey jerseys and baggy pants. He knew he looked oh so clean.

Indeed, as one of the men’s teams walked past one of them said, ‘Ace, man, somebody’s brought me a Pakeha to make really dirty.’

‘Don’t take any notice of them,’ I said to Jerry as he went even whiter. ‘Anyway, you’ll be a sure hit with the girls.’

‘I can just see it,’ he said sarcastically, glancing at the group of little kids who were following him, pointing at him and giggling. But before he could brood any more, the tournament began.

Nani Kepa wandered onto the field, shooed away a couple of cows, and shouted into a megaphone. ‘People, would you please remember to close the gate when you come onto the paddock?’ he asked. ‘Otherwise you’re all going to put your feet into some rather embarrassing substances.’ He announced that it was time for the Grand Parade.

‘What’s that?’ Jerry asked.

‘Before the games begin,’ I told him, ‘all the teams parade around the field and the best-dressed team wins a cup.’

‘You’ve got to be joking.’

‘No,’ I answered. ‘Come on!’

I pulled Jerry over to where the Waituhi men’s team was standing. All four of them: Dad, Uncle Hepa, Boy Boy and Hone. Now we were six. We needed five more.

‘Mo-Crack will be here any minute,’ Dad said. ‘He’s coming from the pub. Then Frank’ll be here after he’s dropped Bub at her work. That makes eight, enough for the parade. Come on, boys.’

We followed Dad onto the field where all the other teams were milling: eight other men’s teams and sixteen women’s teams from the Coast. The women, naturally, were dressed in uniform. One of the men’s teams was too. But the rest … well …

‘I feel so conspicuous,’ Jerry muttered as we were marching around the field. I couldn’t help but agree. Apart from being a head taller than anybody else, Jerry was also the only one with red hair and freckles. Not only that but he was spotless as.

‘Hey, Pakeha,’ somebody laughed. ‘See that cowpat? It’s got your name on it.’

Dad consoled Jerry. ‘We’ll protect you,’ he said. Dad turned to me. ‘That was a great idea for you to bring such a well dressed friend with you. With him on our side we’re bound to win the parade.’

We all laughed and, by the time the parade had lined up to be judged, Jerry was feeling more at ease.

Nani Kepa and a woman from an East Coast team were the judges. They wandered along the ranks of the women’s teams, inspecting the dressage, uniforms and overall appearance as if the women were on military parade. Nani Kepa’s eagle eyes darted here and there, making sure that socks had been pulled up to the right length, shirts were tucked in and boots polished and laced properly. Competition for the parade was always a more serious business for the women than the men — and, after all, there was more at stake than just a hockey match. You think these girls had taken hours to glam themselves up just for a walk around a cow paddock? Get real. They were here to find boyfriends too or, at the very least, a date for the dance — and get that cup and their brief shining moment of stardom.

Nani Kepa and the woman from the East Coast team went into a huddle. They announced the winner. Unfortunately, that winner happened to be the team of which the woman judge was captain. There was great applause from their followers and catcalls from their rivals. ‘Favouritism! Favouritism!’

‘I must say that that’s a bit unfair,’ Jerry said.

‘Actually,’ I explained, ‘it’s a good decision. That team hasn’t won for a few years and it’s their time this year.’

The judges took less time over the men’s teams. The woman judge took a shuddering look at the motley lot and hastened quickly over to the only men’s team which was wearing uniforms. However, on the way the clouds opened and the sun blazed down on Jerry in all his flawless glory. That did it. The woman judge came staggering over to our team to make sure that she wasn’t having a vision and then pointed a finger at him.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, taking a closer look. ‘You are most definitely the winner.’

The crowd clapped and cheered. The few derisive hoots were soon booed out of existence.

‘But that other team should have won!’ Jerry said.

‘They always win,’ I answered. ‘It’s about time they lost.’

‘No, it’s not that,’ Dad said, winking at Jerry. ‘Didn’t you see the way that lady judge was looking at you, boy? You better watch out. She’s a man-eater!’

Then Nani Kepa rang the cowbell again, which meant that the games were to start. He announced the first round: a game between two of the women’s teams. The fun began. The women began yelling to one another.

‘We got enough sticks?’

‘Who’s worrying about sticks! Worry about whether we got enough players first!’

‘Hey, Huria! Put the baby down and come and be our left wing, eh?’

‘Which side is left!’

‘What about Nani Marama? What about asking her to play for us? She used to be a good player.’

‘Yeah, fifty years ago maybe, when she was twenty.’

‘Well, she can still stand on her legs and walking stick, can’t she? She can be our goalie. So how do you play this game again? I’ve forgotten.’

‘So have I! Hey, Cissie, what’s the rules!’

‘Don’t you girls worry. Look, you hold the stick this way and you try to hit the ball over into the other side’s goal. Not that one, that’s ours. The other one. See? It’s only easy.’

All this time Jerry was just standing there, stunned.

‘I don’t believe it,’ he said, as he saw the women taking the field. About half were dressed in uniforms, so one could assume they knew what they were doing. As for the others, well, Huria was hitching her skirt into her pants, Nani Marama was borrowing Nani Kepa’s glasses so she could see where the goal was, and Cissie was still yelling to other girls to come and help out. Among them was my cousin Moana, who was actually supposed to be playing for another team.

‘Be a cuz, Moana!’

‘But I’ve left my stick in the bus!’ Moana answered.

Jerry came to the rescue. ‘You can borrow mine,’ he said.

Moana was the fantastic looking cousin I had actually tried to tell Jerry about. Not that I needed to. I saw the way she and Jerry looked at each other and, even though it was a sunny day, I had the uneasy feeling that both had been struck by lightning. It was one thing to introduce Jerry but did I actually want it to go any further?

‘What a babe,’ Jerry said.

No, no, three times no. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ I warned him.

The game began. It was a match showing all the expertise of military manoeuvres, and the women played it superbly.

If you couldn’t reach the ball and a rival player could, you threw your stick at it or her.

If you swung at the ball and missed, you swung again. Whatever you hit, player or ball, it was all the same. If you missed the ball and hit the player, too bad for her. She shouldn’t have been in the road anyway.

If you hadn’t played the game before and you didn’t know what to do when the ball came your way, don’t worry about it: just sit on it. Then the referee would blow the whistle and the game would start again.

Not to worry if you got hit yourself. Just remember who it was who hit you and, some time later in the game, hit her back.

See? It was an easy game.

‘This isn’t hockey,’ Jerry said. ‘Look at that girl! She’s standing way off side.’

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ I answered. ‘She’s from Waituhi. Nani Kepa is refereeing this game. He’s from Waituhi too.’

‘But that’s favouritism!’

‘No it isn’t. That other team won last year. It wouldn’t be fair …’

‘I know,’ Jerry sighed, ‘… if they win again this year!’

‘There’s another reason,’ I added. ‘Nani Kepa actually can’t see without his glasses. Wasn’t that clever of Nani Marama? I tell you, Waituhi people are cunning as.’ I laughed and patted Jerry on the shoulder. ‘It’s always like this at the beginning, Jerry. After the first rounds are over only the good teams are left, the ones who have really come here to play hockey. As for the rest, well, they’ve come not just because the game’s important but because coming is important. Coming, meeting together, laughing together, having fun together, remembering our family ties, that’s what the tournaments are all about. We have to make the most of these few days we have because, afterwards, it’s back to work, back to life. Back to —’

Yes, Dad, sometimes I do lose track of who I am and what I am. Pakeha life is so seductive.

At that moment there was a roar from the crowd. The opposing team were approaching the Waituhi goal. Alarmed, Nani Marama yelled out to Nani Kepa:

‘Kepa? Hoi, Kepa! You better stop that girl, or else you’re sleeping in the cowshed tonight.’

What else was Nani Kepa to do? After all, Nani Marama was his honeybun. He blew the whistle. ‘Offside,’ he said.

The Waituhi supporters cheered and laughed. The other side started to remonstrate. But Nani Kepa was unmoved. He ordered a penalty hit for Waituhi. Cissie slammed the ball and it sped down the field. Huria picked it up, saw Moana standing in the opposing team’s circle, and lifted the ball to her. However, one of the fullbacks fell on it and wouldn’t get up.

‘Oh, Auntie, please get off the ball,’ Moana yelled.

‘Nope,’ the woman answered. ‘And if you hit me, Moana, I’ll tell your mother.’

Other women crowded around. Nani Kepa tried to get through to see what was going on. One of the Waituhi women tripped him up — and while he was otherwise occupied, Moana reached under her auntie, picked up the ball with her hands and threw it into the goal.

‘Goal!’ Cissie cried.

Nani Kepa got up. What was that? Where was the ball? Oh, was that it in the other side’s goal? How did it get there!

‘Goal,’ Nani Kepa confirmed.

This time, a really huge argument began. The coach for the other side came running onto the field to eyeball Nani Kepa. Laughing, Moana and the Waituhi team came back to the middle of the field to wait out the commotion. She looked at Jerry. He looked at her.

‘Great goal,’ he said.

‘Thank you for letting me use your hockey stick,’ Moana answered.

‘You might even win,’ Jerry smiled.

Moana’s eyes twinkled. ‘Does that really matter?’ she asked.

Then Dad was there. ‘Well, son, we’ve made it through to another year,’ he said.

I thought of my kuia, Miro, and how she had begun the tournament as a way of keeping up our tribal links, one village with the others. You know: the family that plays together stays together. And what’s going to happen when it’s Dad’s turn to go and the sky falls down?

Even so, I smiled at Dad.

‘Yes, Dad,’ I answered.

Most of the stories in Pounamu Pounamu are set in Waituhi. I was twenty-five in 1969 when I began writing them, after reading a comment by Bill Pearson in a book edited by Erik Schwimmer, The Maori People in the Nineteen-Sixties: A Symposium (1968), that there were as yet no Maori novelists; I decided to give it a go by practising on short stories first.

It was Nani Mini herself who complained when I told her that I had a dilemma — whether or not to give a fictional name to Waituhi, because that would mean that I would have more creative freedom: I wouldn’t have to stick to the correct physical details, think about the whakapapa (genealogy) for my characters, and so on. It was for the protection of Waituhi too, I explained, because there were only around fifty families living there at the time and I didn’t want them to be exposed. She really gave me what-for. ‘Aren’t you proud of Waituhi? Are you ashamed of us?’ Although I finally agreed with her, I did shift her house in the stories to a space where I could disconnect it from the reality. And I did rename the characters I was writing about: for instance, Nani Mini is Nani Miro in the stories. I was quite prepared to share Nani Miro with a reading public, but Nani Mini was mine.

Waituhi, even in 1969, was still a great tribal centre for Te Whanau a Kai, my father’s iwi. It was a well-known Ringatu stronghold, centred on the painted meeting house Rongopai, although none of this dimension exists in the stories — that was to come later in my career. Waituhi was also a centre of cultural competitions and, of course, Maori sporting competitions like hockey. One of my other grandmothers, Nani Teria (she was my ‘real’ grandmother, my father’s mother, and one of the inspirations for Riripeti in The Matriarch) and her husband Perapunahamoa, plus Nani Mini, Nani George and many others, decided to set up the Maori hockey tournaments on the East Coast at the urging of the great Sir Apirana Ngata. He felt that sport was one way of maintaining all the links between the many small kainga of Poverty Bay and the East Coast. In their heyday, the tournaments attracted between thirty and forty teams and over 500 people. They were huge, boisterous, with lots of kai and dances; and, of course, Ta Api must have known that the tournaments would also encourage unity in other ways … like young men and women from different hockey teams getting married sooner or later.

This story is one that people like to think of as quintessential Ihimaera. In my deck of cards, it showed that I had a strong suit in humour and knockabout comedy, not always something that writers can do. And by the time I came to writing as a career, having that one foot in one culture and the other in another had given me sufficient distance to be able to ‘see’ Waituhi — but through the eyes of the outsider, Jerry.

The story came about when I was at the University of Auckland. Dad rang me up to come home to play in that year’s hockey tournament. The Waituhi team, he said, was short of players. He asked me to bring a friend along, and I took Billy, who became Jerry in the story.