I guess it was a common enough trek in those times.

Ivan was a diligent scholar. I have the ornate ‘Good Attendance Certificate of the First Class’ from Winton School, one dated 1911, certifying that Ivan Taylor ‘has been present every time the school was open, both in the morning and afternoon’. It is a beautifully designed document, demonstrating a surprising degree of bicultural sensitivity for that day and age. An intricate koru design set off with a branch of pohutukawa in full flower, and two small depictions—one of Mitre Peak and one of a kiwi—the whole thing the work of an Invercargill lithographer.

Ivan’s certificate of two years later is less auspicious. It is of ‘the Second Class’, indicating fewer than five half-days of absence in the year. Possibly the time of Granny’s demise and funeral.

By age fourteen or fifteen, he had left school and started work as a cadet in New Zealand Railways. This was clearly not of great appeal, because he moved on from there and did several years with the Wellington firm of EW Mills where, again according to my mother, he could have had a stellar career. By the time Ivan and Dorothea met, during the Depression, he was a driver, delivering small goods, bacon and sausages for Hutton’s. He was to be a driver for about twenty years, one way or another. He was a driver for the whole of his World War II service. He drove a bread-delivery van, at least part-time, in order to supplement our family income during our years in Levin.

I will never know what ambitions, if any, he had for himself. He never said. He seemed content with his lot. He provided for us. He was a dutiful husband. He was to care for my mother, in every respect, during the last agonizing twelve years of her life after a series of crippling strokes left her almost completely incapacitated. She needed him. He didn’t complain. I wish I had told him how much I admired him, how much I loved him. Maybe he knew. I am sure that Ivan lived another life in his mind that he never felt compelled to share and that largely excluded those around him—not in any deliberate, uncaring way, but simply, at times, as unnecessary distractions.

I remember phoning him once just to see how things were going. ‘Hello, Father, it’s Bill here.’

‘Bill? Bill who?’

This was late in his life, but I never let him forget it. On another occasion, before my mother died, he arrived home one day and said to us, ‘This strange woman stopped me in town. Asked all these questions—seemed to know you all. No idea who it was. Very nosy, she was.’

Later the same day, I answered the phone. ‘Had a good long chat to Ivan in town today. Do you know, I don’t think he had the slightest idea who I was!’ It was his sister, Aunty Florrie Cresswell.

Such was the surface of his life. But there was more that he seldom ever mentioned. He had been a surf lifesaver, an excellent swimmer.