An early work-in-progress dedicated to helping,
circuitously, precipitate the Great Mobilisation
Dare to be wise!
Kant
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 high-school English-language textbook, J G ‘Butch’ Brown himself:
Just because you come from the country, Cole, doesn’t mean you can spell across with two cs!
Alliterationthis tool-tip text primarily for the aid of the short-term-memory-loss-afflicted author, rather than the reader of average wit: Brown’s come; country; Cole; can; Cs 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 be 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 amount 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 diagnosed—by a decade 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 were more enough to gain a comfortably 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 stylised maps. Here, Cimino’s little-big sister’s high-school-geography-teacher vivacity saved the day, or at least his legendary annual possible-probables list of geographic regions likely to be examination options was key, and one that was shared, no matter the master had long since moved on to more salubrious institutions. Cimino further refined the list to those he’d already largely learnt. Result: Mac’s money was not completely wasted.
Impatient to be making his own way, and his second-lieutenant-intelligence-officer father long since holding out no loftier aspirations for his son beyond a trade, Cimino began a boat-building apprenticeship, hoping it would lead to design. Before long, the same issue that had almost had him prevented from sitting his final high-school examination, re-erupted. While most of his old Kūiti classmates were cultivating adorable-to-their-mothers pageboy haircuts, motherless lone-wolf Cimino had grown a beard. Mount Albert Grammar’s first-assistant enforcer was incandescent, but Cimino judged he’d cave when the implications of barring a student from an examination hall sank in. The Monday morning after his Auckland-establishment boat-building boss issued his ultimatum on facial hair, Cimino appeared clean shaven, and with his letter of resignation. An authority defying pattern of standing up for his beliefs, was developing, culminating in a making his mark on the Waiwera mineral pools, in defiance of the retained wastewater engineer who had dismissed 23-year-old Cimino’s attempts to discuss the planned new water treatment schematic with:
Frankly, my boy, the complexity of the chemistry here is far beyond you or I.
Over the weekend, and working through a heavy cold if not influenza, Cimino designed and schematised, colour-coded, for the far-from technologically gifted owner, on his Monday-morning visit to review the admission takings. When directed to consider the schematic, haughty engineer produced a set of finalised construction drawings of the and filtration, then summons Cimino to find fault with them. Expecting a discussion, Cimino was taken aback and looked uncomprehendingly at mass of pumps and pipework, before stopping his first objection, then another and another. Days later Cimino learned the owner had refused to proceed without his blessing, and the engineer was denied payment for some of his non-approved services. The all-new system was a triumph: crystal clear water the morning after the grubbiest, most desperate Sunday evening the region’s horniest, last-weekend-hurrah youth could chuck at. Cimino had earlier sought a state-of-the-art update from his then wife’s godfather—the country’s foremost authority on public-swimming-pool heating and treatment.
Aside from denying bathers contact with its mineral water, imperious engineer was planning to run it to waste after having only extracted a fraction of its marginal energy with a heat exchanger, before using electricity to make up the deficit. With or without Cimino’s solution, the holiday weekend pools reopening deadline would have been missed, if not the entire summer’s patronage. Cimino was less successful with his Waiwera mineral pools masterplan, unaware the owner was secretly planning to soon sell up. Bottom line was that Waiwera—literally: water hot—wasn’t particularly; straight out of the hottest bores, it was not wildly hotter than the hottest spa pool temperature considered safe. Nor was the resource limitless, meaning that on windy days it became a struggle to keep the larger exposed pools sufficiently warm without over-pumping and risking damage to the aquifer. Traditionally, Māori bathers could freely alternate between the gulf waters and small, improvised piping-hot shoreside pools. Particularly invigorating on wet winter’s day, the art could still be practiced in Cimino’s youth. Given that patronage, ironically, was at its peak in the warmer, northeastern-coastline-enticing half of the year—not least of all, during the summer break—huge unrealised potential existed for a vast, cold, saltwater pool to contrast with the varied…
To be continued…
Waiwera mineral-free pools Had the supercilious engineer and his impenetrable industrial chemist had their way, future pilgrims to Waiwera would have bathed in electrically heated town-supply water—cyanuric-acid-stabilised and chlorinated. Their professional answer to the vexing complexity alleged was a non-starter with the owner, and so…
Across with two cs J G ‘Butch’ Brown, Mount Albert Grammar, English teacher and ‘Senior Five’ class master, to Cimino:
Just because you come from the country, Cole, doesn’t mean you can spell across with two cs!
Then, only at age 77, did the onetime subeditor realise he’d invariably chosen to spell choose with one o.
Referenced
Light the Fuse : Aspirations of a Dumb-Arse Intellectual, “Just because you come from the country…”
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