I’ve already decided that the story I’d found of top-dressing pilot versus bellicose ewe who won’t yield right of way on the landing strip will make a good opening. Just some of David Hill’s books.īut very soon, I start to write. My friends sit down to talk, joke, exult over missing Maths. We’ve got two hours, unsupervised except by benign, bespectacled Mrs Potter the librarian, who smiles at us from her office. On a winter afternoon, half-a-dozen of us from the Upper Sixth troop into the NBHS school library. ![]() Well into the next century, it remains a jolt for me to stop the cosy, responsibility-lite procrastination of research and move onto the nakedness, the vulnerability of actual writing. It’s an unexpectedly satisfying process makes me feel purposeful. I come across anecdotes of crises and crashes somehow glimpse how they could lift the essay. I lug them home to our grotty little place on Hospital Hill, and start taking notes – places, cargos, types of biplane. It’s the late 1950s, remember online research isn’t even a gleam over the horizon. No disrespect to Jones or his family, but it’s hardly a subject to quicken the blood, especially when that blood festers with adolescent hormones.īut I go to the Napier Public Library, up two flights of mock-marble stairs above an accountant’s, and find some relevant books. The topic for 1959 is The History of Aerial Top-Dressing in New Zealand. ![]() I want to win and have my name read out in assembly. Nor do I enter out of any commitment to literature/writing. Sorry for that dismissal, but I’m just 17, and far too centred on my spotty self to consider anyone else. Why do I decide to have a go? It’s not to honour or acknowledge Russell Jones or his parents. Let’s wrench things into an imaginary present tense. ![]() Since their son had been obsessed with flying, they specified it must always have an aviation motif. His desolate parents offered money to establish a memorial essay competition at his old school. I always think of him as young, because he was only in his 20s when he died, shot down over Germany in World War II. I’m in my final year at Napier Boys’ High, and I’m about to earn my first money from writing.Īmong the old boys of NBHS, about two decades ahead of me, was a young bloke called Russell Jones. How a 17-year-old dreaming of nothing more than a round of applause at assembly started ‘chucking down a load of crap’, and ended up finding his calling.
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