While certainly not poverty-stricken, we were moderately but respectably poor. The small farm, farmlet really, of a few acres, market garden and orchard, was the rehab reward to my father for his four or five years of service during the war in North Africa, Egypt, the Middle East and Greece.

I had no idea at all of what a father was until I was six years old. Not uncommon back then, but, for all that, it came as quite a shock when I finally discovered I had one!

Any notion I might have harboured about fathers in general would undoubtedly have been romantic and coloured in full by Mother: ‘Oh yes, dear. The day you were born—I remember it as if it were yesterday. You were born at the moment of a beautiful dawn, fine and clear. Little birds, thrushes and blackbirds, were singing in the trees outside the window of my room.’

I must have been in my forties when one day I repainted this lovely image to my father as we sat reminiscing about this and that. ‘Utter bloody rot,’ he said. ‘It was the middle of the night and it was pissing down with rain. No chirping birds within sight or sound that night…’

Whatever, Lower Hutt was somewhat smaller then than now. The private nursing home where Margaret and I, and later, Hugh, were born, is long gone. For many years the actual spot where I first saw the light of either a crystal-clear bird-infested morning or a rain-soaked midnight sported a McDonald’s. However, the Big Macs have now gone the way of the nursing home and made way for the entrance to a shopping mall. Where no birds sing.

One year, two months and twenty-eight days after me, Margaret was born. She and I have always precisely known this age difference. In childhood we recited it as a sort of mantra…A few weeks after her advent, Father took off to war.

I suspect it was probably just after Father took off to do his bit for King and Country in 1940 that I had my first brush with notoriety—when I was voted Wellington’s Centennial Baby. I think it was a Plunket-inspired event based on a popular vote. No personal appearances were required. Those interested simply voted for the most photogenic wee mite. Although, in the beauty stakes, it has been a downhill slide ever since, my photo-portrait from the occasion shows that I was one stunningly soulful and wide-eyed little innocent. According to Mama—and who am I to doubt her?—I also made it to number five nationwide. Or maybe it was number seven. Fact or fiction? Who knows? Margaret, on the other hand, had to wait her turn, but did make it to the Plunket handbook of that era where her perfect milk-teeth were featured.

Possibly as a result of being famed for only her teeth rather than her full head, my sister decided to even the score by getting rid of me altogether. I was putty in her hands, even if those hands were one year, two months and twenty-eight days younger than mine. Mother’s much older sister, Agnes (Ga, as we called her), lived with us during the war years. She took care of us while Mother, after a two-week stint of packing biscuits for Griffins—a job not to her liking—worked, man-powered into wartime clerical service at the War Office in Wellington. I think I know which job I would have rather had…

One afternoon, poor old Ga decided to take what was likely a well-deserved forty winks, and Margaret seized the moment. Taking me by the hand, Margaret led me from our home in Waterloo, Lower Hutt, and escorted me to the nearby suburban rail station where we waited on the platform for the next train. It came. I clambered up the steps into the carriage, Margaret urging, pushing me from behind. I have never forgotten her words to me as she waved goodbye: ‘Go and find your mother,’ she called.

For obvious reasons, I cannot recall the glory days of my Centennial Baby success, but I certainly do remember ‘going to find my mother’.