Chapter Two - Looking Down from The Clouds

From Letters To My Mother. They found me in a ditch when I was just four years old. No-one knew I had been lost. It was the year 1963.

When I was very little, Dad drove our whole family up into the foothills for a day in the snow. We lived at high tide on a beach and were children of the shifting seas, breezes, and waves. Snow must have been like cotton candy. I imagine we were all very excited.

On this day, we set off in the family VW Beetle. We left the beach in the dark, before dawn, wanting to get a good start on the day so we would be home in time for tea. (Mum had loaded an apple crate with a thermos of tea and paper-wrapped sandwiches, and apples. Bottles of orange juice as a treat from the milk man. Everything was for breakfast later. A picnic in the snow).

I often think of that car; it seemed too playful. Dad was a serious, handsome, balding, hard-working, family man. Maybe it was Mum who wanted the VW, or maybe it was cheap. More than likely cheap, it being not long after the war and all. VW was a German car. And us in New Zealand. The important thing for you to remember about this green, smiley-faced, not so comical VW Beetle is that the motor is in the back, where the boot would be in a normal car. The whole family - Mum, Dad, me, my older brother, and a toddler and a baby - were hurtling along in a vehicle with as much protection from a collision as a pram with a lacy cover on a sloping hill in a storm.

This was the last day we would see this car.

The last day we would go to the snow.

The last day we would hear our mother's voice.

In those days, they did not have seat belts for children. In the legend that surrounds this story, Dad was wearing his, but Mum had taken hers off because it irritated her and she was writing music. Mum was a singer of Irish folk songs, believe it or not, and even had a record. (So the story goes). 

Anyway, the baby was in a carrycot behind the back seat, literally in the back window, while my two siblings were bouncing about in the back seat. Because I got car sick, I would ride standing up in the front driver's seat, tucked in behind my Dad's shoulder as he drove. I had to be able to see; I still do, and I did not like to be tied down. And I might vomit. Game over.

I held Dolly, who was a knitted doll Grandma made for me. She had a hand-sewn face that had to be reapplied every now and then. I was never without Dolly. Never. Ever. 

We drove up along the seashore and soon turned up into the hills. They were close. Everything is close in New Zealand, even mountains. I would have been swallowing hard and clutching Dolly close to my mouth. She smelled of thumbs and Mums talc and was my comfort doll. Being car sick is my curse, and the roads are windy. It was still dark out but with that half-light that signals dawn is near.

Mum was humming, waiting for the light and Dad was wondering if it was time to stop for a cuppa.

We were driving up a stretch and around a bend and a farm truck coming towards us down the mountain hit ice and spun headlong into our car. A head on collision. The truck crumpled the VW inwards, shunting it backwards towards the cliff edge and my mother (who was not wearing a seat belt because she was making music remember) shot forwards straight through the front windscreen. Head first. Propelled by the hideous force of these two vehicles smashing into each other head on. She literally breached the glass with her face. Her hands holding her belly twisting as she was flung out.

I was ejected straight out after her, the way was now clear. Twisting and bouncing like a little rag doll through the flying glass and spinning cars.  No one knows what really happened to me. I remember nothing except noise. However, they believe that, being tiny, I bounced off the cars, through the glass, across the road, through the verge, and rolled into the ditch. Out of sight. Gone.

I always maintain that I must have gone through the same trajectory as Mum. It's physics, right? So how then did I roll so much further and into a deep ditch on the other side of the road? Still, silent, and out of sight when my mother shot out the same window like a grounded torpedo, bounced off the farmer's truck, and straight along the road until she stopped. Because I was so little maybe?

They told me, when I was older, that Mum was smashed to bits, her face torn up by the windscreen and the road, her throat lacerated by swallowing her own teeth. Face cut up with glass they spent hours picking out in surgery. And she was instantly unconscious.  Dad was trapped by twisted metal, behind the wheel of the car, his leg badly broken and moving in and out of consciousness. Cars stopped. Passers by took the other children out of our beat up VW Beetle and kept them warm in their own cars.

Miraculously, my brothers and sisters were fine: bruised and shocked, but fine.

No one thought to look for another child. Why would they? They had already found three.

A person drove quickly to a nearby farm to call an ambulance.

Someone covered my mother with a coat.

Our dad was unconscious, caught behind the wheel.

Much later, as this story was spun into the web of family legend, Dad said that the two men in the other car were drunk (in the morning?) but were never heard from again. I certainly have no memory of them - flung straight out of hell to smash into our family, then gone back to hell again.

Two ambulances came. And left.

There are three things I remember from after the accident, as clear as an un-rung bell: the total silence once the ambulances, tow trucks, and police had left, I still felt the expectation of hands lifting me out. Secondly, latently, I realised they had not taken me; and then seeing myself lying in the ditch, still, with my eyes open.

There was a kind man with me, a man in a woolly green jacket, a beanie pulled low over his ears, and a upside down tin hat perched on the grass verge beside his pack. He sat hunched with his back to me, watching the road.

I lay face up in the ditch and watched him.

It was so quiet now.

It remained quiet for a long time. The sun had already risen, but it was cold in the ditch.

When I woke up, I was high up and he was still sitting beside the girl. The girl in the ditch. I could see her from up there. I slept in the clouds. 

I woke up again, and she was talking in the early morning.

"When I grow up, I am going to tie ribbons to big clouds," she said. "So they can come with me wherever I go."

"We'd better get you some help, or you won't be growing up at all," the man said, aiming his soft voice at the road as though talking around her.

"I don't think you're meant to say those kinds of things to little people."

"What kinds of things?" He kept his eyes on the road.

"Things about dying."

He pulled his hat further over his ears. "There's no reason to pretend."

She was silent for a while.

"Where are Mum and Dad?" she said. "And Dolly, where is my Dolly?" Her voice pitched up. "Where's my Mum?"

I swallowed blood. My face felt wrong somehow. I raised my hand to touch my face, but the hand did not rise. It was caught in the whiteness up there.  Which was fine. I don’t remember feeling unduly worried. The sun was spreading light for us. I slept. I woke. I felt blood like dried cake on my face. She was talking again.

"I will need a really tall ladder to reach my cloud to tie the ribbon around its neck," she said. Her eyes blinked up. "It will need to be a very long ribbon so it can reach me on the ground. And I can hold it. Long, long."

"Most little girls want to grow up and ride horses," he said.

"Do you have a little girl?"

He was silent at that.

"I will tie the ribbon to my cloud and lead it," she said.

"Like a dog?"

"A really big dog that is way up high. Clouds can look like dogs."

She tried to raise her arms to point but her body rose towards me instead.

"Oh," she said, her torn head curling sideways. "I feel strange."

"What kind of strange?"

"I think I was floating, like I sometimes do in the bath." Her breath hitched on a strangled sound. Panic was coming.

The man shifted onto firmer ground in the cramped ditch and laid his big, brown and dirty hand on her ankle. His fingernails looked painful, but the weight of his hand was comforting. It settled her to a whimper, like a frightened puppy gone low.

"Are you warm?" His hand was strong on her ankle, weighing her down. She thought for a moment. "Not warm. Not anything really. But I feel better."

"Tell me the story of the girl with the ribbon. What color is the ribbon?"

"It's yellow. The ribbon is golden yellow like the sun. I will tie it to a cloud with a bow, and when Dad needs rain for his garden, I will bring the cloud."

"Your dad still likes his garden then?"

“Yes. He grows a lot of food in the garden. But I don’t like silverbeet.”

“Neither did he,” said the man.

“My cloud's name will be Bob. Bob is such a big rain cloud that it can fill up a whole garden as fast as a minute. Or maybe a second or a third. Time is hard. I can’t tell it yet.”

“Roger that,” he said.

“But where will my cloud live at night? A horse might take the ribbon and run off with my cloud. Just gallop away.”

“A horse or a zebra.”

“Zebras aren’t real,” she said.

The man grunted, nodding sadly. “May as well have been.”

“Who is Roger?” she asked.

“Just a figure of speech,” he said.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“In the trenches,” he replied. He was silent for a long while. Words had trouble coming to him. “A ditch. We are in a ditch by the road. We just have to hold on until help comes. Just like the war.”

“What is the war?” Her voice sounded like it came from the very bottom of a well. She was smaller somehow. White as snow down there. 

The man was silent for a while, then breathed out fast through his teeth. He reached up and scratched his head, moving his hands down so they caught at the back of his neck, fingertip to fingertip, like reassurance.

“A war is when another sky wants your sky and your cloud is caught in the middle.  You and your cloud and your ribbon are caught in the middle.”

There was more silence while the child just breathed and thought.

“Do they have big scissors to cut my ribbon?”  she whispered.

“Who?”

“The bad people, the bad sky people. The war people.”

“Oh. Yes. They had really big scissors but they are gone now. You are safe now.” He patted her ankle again. Up and down went his hand. She could not see it. But she felt his hand. He squinted up into the winter sun.

“Are you a war man?” she whispered even smaller, Her words little drops of melting snow. 

The man turned all the way around, his eyes blue, his face in dark shade from the sun behind him but blue eyes. The shade from his face reached her face.

“Yes.” his voice was as sorrowful as deep still water. “Yes. I am a war man. We all were”.

He looked back up the road, alert, withdrew his hand that was comfort from her ankle, he rose pulling on his canvas knapsack.

“OK here they come. Best I could do.”

They found me lying silently in the ditch in cold dry snow. My face and hands bloody from the glass and the road and the whole horrible thing. They wrapped me in a blanket and took me to a hospital whereupon examination it was discovered that I had a broken jaw, dislocated shoulder and needed stitches in my face. My hands were soaked and bandaged.

But it was not the same hospital as my family. No-one quite knew where they were. And of course I could not speak.  I had a broken jaw.

I was fixed up, cleaned up and laid in a cot. With no name on my chart.

My Grandma and Pa arrived at the family's hospital that afternoon to find a parents nightmare.   Dad was just coming out of surgery and Mum remained in a coma; she had miscarried, a baby no-one else knew she had been carrying. She was not waking up and her head wounds were so grievous she was receiving the last rites.

Apparently it was not until Dad surfaced groggily a number of hours later and counted his kids, that I was discovered missing. He asked for a phone. In those days the hospital beds had phone jacks beside them and the nurses carried the rotary phones from room to room. Phone numbers were memorised or you looked them up in a special phone number book.  Dad called Mum’s cousin. Black Jack Stevenson. He was the Chief Detective Superintendent of the NZ Police Force.

I am not sure if he was the top guy yet – he may have been a detective still but he set out to find the lost daughter.

It is a long story really – too much for here and probably too boring but (with no computers, no cell phones) Uncle John (they called him Jack but we always called him Uncle John) tracked his lost niece down to a little country hospital on the other side of the lake.

I was waiting. With my Dolly.

I have three visual memories of the time after I was found. Peering through the cot bars at yellow gloomy hospital walls with shadows of leaves playing on the walls like a dance. Playing some kind of slap hand game with Uncle John in the ambulance bay waiting for the ambulance to load us in and drive us to Mum and Dad’s hospital. And the memory of Dad on crutches reaching down to greet me.

Like many old family stories this one was pieced together from the retelling of Grandma (who maintained that Uncle John brought back the wrong child), Uncle John (who portrayed himself as the hero galloping in on a horse to save the lost princess) and my Dad (who had to brush all the knots out of my hair).

My Mum remembers nothing of that time. The damage to her throat and vocal chords was so profound she never sung again and spoke with a very quiet raspy voice for the rest of her life. She would never laugh out loud again.

When I was bigger and after Mum was well enough to come home, I asked Dad who was the man who had sat in the ditch with me for that time after they were gone but he did not know. Though I think Dad believed in ghosts too because when I was older he admitted that he thought that the man who kept me company might have been his Dad. Claude. Who had died before I was born after serving in two world wars.

Uncle John said later he was not sure he had found the right child until he saw my wild hair. Full of knots because I would not let the nurses brush it. My bright blue eyes glowering out from under the wreckage.

But there was Dolly. No-one could work out how she had managed to stay with me through the whole ordeal. My hands are a mass of tiny scars from the road and the wreckage - I could not have held onto a little knitted doll.

Letters to My Mother, The Collection, is a series of stories from my early childhood. They are interesting to untangle because they are written by an adult (me) using the memories of a child (me). Add the legends of the old people.  They are not non-fiction exactly but not all fiction either.

What do we even call that in between work.  Those words looping through a mind of lost archives.

I would also like to gently offer that I am presenting these stories to you from my quiet desk on the farm when I should really be outside working. It is kind of scary to put personal words on paper so I would be ever so grateful if you were able to throw a few dollars into my hat via the paid subscription.

To keep me off the streets and hopefully in tea and cranberry shortbreads.

I will publish a story every Monday, so pop in- have a cup of tea and a yarn with me.