‘Tinakori Road’

Summary

A house-sized box of atmosphere, complete with authentic fittings, repro wallpaper and the creepy photograph of the dead baby: the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace, my choice for an outing in my granddaughter's car on this drenched morning. OK, Julia? Cool.

Heading back we pass our own family shrine, the house where your father spent his infancy: not literally the birthplace – he and Andrew were born in St Helen's hospital – but the ‘Gregory Campbell Learns-to-walk-and-talk, rides-a-tricycle, falls-out-of-a-tree-place’.

In between that house, number 245, and the Birthplace at the far end of the road, there used to stand the ‘Garden-Party’ house: number 75, an even grander KM residence, background to her teens and a cherished focus for Mansfield scholars.

I wasn't there when they demolished it for the motorway, but Prof Gordon was – eighty years old, fizzing like a rocket, bouncing in front of the bulldozers, crushing the impulse to snatch a souvenir plank (what, after all, could he have done with it?)

The same fate befell her old school – my school: not the charmless Lego that's replaced it but the creaky wooden structure where I sat in what was reputed to have been her classroom, gazing into the distance, being her… Well, that's it, Julia. If we had more time

we could drive to where you spent your own childhood – and there she'd be again, preceding us to Karori, to another of her homes and her first school. Was it your first school too? No, yours was Karori West. Still, pretty close. A kind of phantom stalker, that KM.