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Chapter Two

I should mention my name is Thomas McCallum. At ten years old, I felt that I was quite intelligent because of my boundless imagination. I often thought about what it would be like to be a soaring sparrow hawk, a dolphin in the sea or a galloping horse. I loved nature, all types of animals and the mountains we could see from our house. I loved the seasons: the warm summers, the wonderful colours of the trees in autumn and the snow in winter. I also loved my family and especially my Grandmother, whom we called Gabby, short for Gabmuther, which I had called her when I was little.

Gabby lived in Christchurch in a very old house with a lounge room smelling of moth balls, where nobody ever seemed to go but where there was a piano. I would sit at that piano making up my own tunes, so I also had a very good musical imagination. Sometimes, Smokey, the cat, would walk up and down the keyboard as I was playing, and we would have a duet. Smokey and I were the same age, ten, although his ten was much older than my ten. I would play with Smokey by tying a piece of paper onto some string, and he chased it – quite funny really. I would also turn him upside down and fight him with my hand, which bled after a while. It wasn’t so bad for a cat because if he was bored he would go to sleep, but I would go out to the adults, who would talk about our other relatives and the weather, and keep saying we should go but didn’t.

Gabby once had a husband called William, and there was a big photo of him over the piano. My grandfather William owned a nice old car called a Vauxhall, and Gabby kept it in the garage with a dirt floor out by the street. It was black and starting to go a bit rusty in places, probably because the garage leaked, and also one of the tyres was flat. I often sat in the driver’s seat and pretended to drive, changing gears and making engine noises while Smokey curled up in the passenger seat and went to sleep.

The drive from Queenstown in our old Plymouth would take half a day, and we would have to carry a can of water as the radiator would sometimes boil. I always enjoyed the trip to Christchurch as there was some wonderful scenery on the way and we would take a picnic lunch. I would sit in the back with Skipper, my rescued border collie, and we would stop from time to time so Skipper or I could have a pee.

Skipper and I were inseparable, and apart from school days, we were always together. My dad often said, ‘He’s just a dog and should stay outside.’ My mother, on the other hand, would allow Skipper to sleep on the end of my bed provided I bathed him once a week, something we both didn’t actually enjoy. In winter, we would bring his big tub into the laundry and boil the jug to warm up his water. I would get as wet as Skipper, and my mother would complain bitterly about the state of the laundry afterwards. Again, my dad would say Skipper should be outside with the other dogs. I agreed that he should be trained to be a working dog in due course, like Max, a cattle dog crossed with something, and Shep, his birth brother, who looked quite different.

Our visits to Gabby’s place happened on special occasions like funerals and birthdays, and once when my older cousin Mavis was married to some guy who came from Italy. We actually had a lot of relatives in Christchurch, mostly on my mother’s side. My dad said they could talk under water, and sometimes my mother would go with just me and my sister, Rachel. I should add that Rachel is two years older than me. We would catch the Railway Road Services bus, a Bedford with a passenger door the driver could close from his seat. The trip would take almost a day with many stops along the way.

I should also mention that we lived on a farm with 193 cows, one bull, twenty sheep, two horses, three goats, a ginger cat called Felix, two farm dogs, lots of chickens and Skipper. There was a separate smaller house on our farm, where my dad’s farmhand and his wife lived; they were Dutch. Our farm is located near Arthur’s Point in Otago, New Zealand. My mother’s name was Elsie, and my father’s name was Sidney, but everyone called him Sid. My dad was called up immediately after the German offensive against the Western front in May 1940. He returned home in August 1943 so was away at the war for over three years, but he never spoke about it. My mother often said my father came home with no scars outside but with a lot of scars inside.

My dad was quite prominent in the area and once received a bravery award from the Governor General for rescuing a family when a car left the gravel road above Skippers Canyon. Skippers Canyon is a scenic gorge located north of Queenstown. The story was reported in the Otago Daily times on the fifth of July 1945, and I kept the clipping in the drawer beside my bed. The car had ended up twenty feet below the road upside down supported only by a tree with a further drop of about two hundred feet below that. My dad went past the scene in his old truck and noticed marks on the road and flattened bushes. As soon as he got out of his truck, he heard cries for help.

Fortunately, my father carried a lot of equipment in his truck, so his first task was to secure the wreck, which was balancing in a very precarious position. He took a long length of very strong rope, securely tied one end to his truck and basically abseiled hand over hand down to the wreck. There were two adults and two children all basically on top of one another in the back of the upside down car. One of the adults, a woman, was trapped by the legs between the caved-in roof and the top of the front bench seat, and one of the children was unconscious.

As my dad secured the rope to the front axle of the car, the wreck shifted slightly, and he held his breath. He slowly climbed up his rope back to the road, clinging to briar bushes for extra support, until both of his hands bled. It had begun to snow, and the temperature was freezing, complicating the risk of survival for the people below. My dad decided it would be impossible to get the injured out of the car and the only way to save them was to winch the car and passengers up to the road. He ran out the winch on the front of his truck until he had sufficient length of wire rope to reach the wreck and, with a heavy shackle on one end, lowered it down to the car. He then secured the back of his truck to a large pine tree and climbed back down his rope. Halfway down, there was a loud splintery crack as the tree supporting the car gave way, leaving it literally hanging from the rope. My dad was really surprised that the rope didn’t break as the wreck swung wildly, with nothing below it for hundreds of feet.

He inched his way to the wreck fully aware that his weight over and above that of the car might cause the rope to break with certain death for the passengers and possibly himself. The wire rope and shackle was about five feet away, but he was able to lie across the front of the still swinging car and hook it with his foot. His hands, still bloody from the briar bushes, suffered further from handling the wire rope, and he cursed because he had no feeling in them from the freezing temperature. He had forgotten his leather gloves in the truck in his haste to secure the wrecked car. Fortunately, he had already loosened the shackle pin, so he managed to secure it to the car’s axle.

Within moments, no doubt due to the extra weight and movement, the rope snapped, and the wreck again lurched as its weight was taken by the wire rope. The unbroken section of rope shot up then dangled back, so my dad was able to stretch his free hand and grab hold of it. Once again, my dad hoisted his way back up to where he was able to get his feet against the rocky slope and, with the aid of the unfriendly briar bushes, made it back to the road.

Sometimes in life, there is a moment of truth, and a simple event saved five lives. Had the dangling rope been six inches further away, they would certainly have died because it would have been impossible to climb up the greasy wire rope with no foothold.

My dad engaged the winch, and the wreck, with its pitiful prisoners, gradually reached the top of the embankment, having swivelled so it was now still backwards but the right way up. However, the extra effort of taking the wreck from a swinging hulk to the resistance of the ground beneath it caused the winch motor to burn out. Fortunately (if that’s the right word), the motion of hauling the wreck freed the woman’s trapped legs. My dad was not conscious of the fact that a small group of people had gathered and seen the dilemma, and someone had driven to get help. An ambulance soon arrived to receive the patients. My dad was now inside the wreck, comforting the poor souls. The injured child, a small boy, had regained consciousness but had a bad gash to his head. His sister had a broken arm. The woman broke both legs, and her husband was uninjured, but in an advanced state of shock. A second ambulance had now arrived, and the delicate task of removing the patients took more than two hours. My dad received treatment for his injured hands at the scene, but his hands are still scarred to this very day.

Anyway, back to my saga in the river. When I opened my eyes, someone had put a blanket over me but had ignored my little friend, assuming he was dead. I reached out, grabbed one of his front legs and pulled him under the blanket. With his cold, wet little body, I also assumed the same. Then there was a small movement, more of a twitch really, so I put my ear to his body and heard a faint heartbeat. I began rubbing him hard with the blanket, and soon a little pink tongue appeared. The little tongue eventually began licking my hand – not the actions of a dead puppy. My mum and dad were there now, soothing and loving. They had obviously been out looking, because they already had my bike and school bag; they had been standing on the Frankton Road Bridge as we were swept underneath.

The Shotover River runs close to our farm, and the events of April 1949 have remained with me ever since that fateful day, when Skipper came into my life.