Light the fuse

Not the great New Zealand mobilisation novel

An early work-in-progress dedicated to helping,
circuitously, precipitate the Great Mobilisation

Dare to be wise!
Kant

Chapter 7

Aspirations of a dumb-arse intellectual

Thy Sea is So Great and the World is So Small: That a Mahurangi-built sister ship of the world’s most famous Falmouth quay punt, Curlew, should fetch up across the road from where Terry Bond’s did, in Huawai Bay… image National Maritime Museum Cornwall Trust

Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress published 20240725

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
A long way from home
Traditional

One, final year at a campus more hallowed than a recently built district high school didn’t dramatically deepen Cimino’s education. Mount Albert Grammar, at the time, wasn’t even excelling in its previous one-claim-to-fame—rowing—down from its distant, 1949 heyday. There, English was instilled in the class called Senior Five, by the author of the  school English-teaching-textbook, J G ‘Butch’ Brown himself:

Just because you come from the country, Cole, doesn’t mean you can spell across  with two cs!

Alliteration and the cane had broken a number of bad habits, of he and his classmates, including the occasion when, without collusion, almost the entire class had ignored homework assigned ahead of a long weekend. The class contained a comfortable number of wayward pupils who, having failed their basic, school certificate examination, were serving a second, shameful term in the fifth form. The year, however, was not to wasted:

You agree that, with all the money that this year is going to cost me, if you don’t  get your school certificate, that that would be a great waste of my money, don’t you!

Cimino agreed. It sounded a surprisingly large of money. Reflecting, a lifetime later, Cimino chuckles. The tuition was paid for by the state. The only cost to Mac had been the difference between his son’s food and electricity costs at home, and the pittance charged for his board, in a succession of dodgy suburban lodgings that year—and, granted, a new jersey and second-hand blazer.

Academically, Cimino had always thought of himself as literally slow. It took him forever just to copy lessons from his primary school blackboard. By the time, with only a couple of school years remaining, his acute shortsightedness had been detected—by a much older first cousin—the academic expectations for Cimino had become exceedingly modest. Cimino’s hard drive, however, was plagued by a distinctly pedestrian transfer speed; his devastating rejoinders, for example, were typically conceived days after the opportunity for their opportunity. Senior Five, and a strategic collaboration with the school’s star, smart-as-a-whip halfback and fellow second-year-fifth-former, fortunately, saw them both partially out of bondage, and experiencing tantalising snatches of genuine agency. The halfback was a friend of an art teacher at the college. Not his and Cimino’s art teacher, mind, but somehow—but almost certainly because the school couldn’t risk using him from its first-fifteen, Cimino only realises in retrospect—he and the halfback had their own office in which to break the back of their homework. Neither had any interest in creating further artwork. Each was entirely confident that the techniques they had already mastered was more enough to gain a considerably above-average mark. English and geography were Cimino’s favourite subjects. English because he invariably topped his class in readingknown then as written comprehension comprehension, and geography, because it interested him so deeply, and he had developed his own map-drawing method that produced uncannily convincing likenesses of regions taught. Cimino’s vulnerability, however, was memorising sufficient data to back up the cartoon maps. Here, Cimino’s little-big sister’s high-school-geography-teacher infatuation saved the day, or at least his legendary annual possible-probables  list of geographic regions was key, and one that was shared, no matter he’d long since moved on to more salubrious institutions. Cimino further refined the list to those he already largely had learnt. Result: Mac’s money was not wasted.

‹ Chapter 6   |  Chapter 8 ›

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