Harden Up?

I have once again drifted away from the ongoing sage of the expected punishment from my father, for splitting open the head of my younger brother (I believe this story started around the April the 1^st blog… but it’s no April Fool). Remember, it was an accident, with serious consequences. Fortunately it wasn’t fatal. It could have been. I have had my brother say it has affected him for life (or so he has been told). Again many members of our family have had extremely serious injuries for one reason or another. Today a phrase I hear a lot (usually said in jest between colleagues) is “Harden up princess”. I am sure this has come about thanks to the widely read fairy tale of the ‘Princess and the Pea’ by Hans Christian Anderson (cough cough)? The idea, that a little bit of pain, will interrupt everything. I mean really! Okay. For him it was a lot of pain. For me it was the expectation of a lot of pain to come. And no I don’t really think the princess and the Pea is the basis for that phrase (But as a storyteller, I wish it was).

There I was, sitting in my shared bedroom. Not that any of the other boys wanted to be within a mile of this room (and were not) at that time. Awaiting the decision of my father as to what punishment I was to receive. I had heard the footfalls since he arrived home. I had heard the steps in the house as he went to the telephone at the front of the house (yes, houses only had one phone, if they had one back then). He had returned to the lounge, closing the door, likely to ruminate upon the method of punishment delivery. I strained to hear any faint sound of possible conversational decision making he, and my mother may have been having. It was fairly pointless. Even if I had had a glass pressed to the door, in that classic of eavesdroppers poses, two doors made it near impossible to hear anything. And the walls? Too thick.

Please remember this was a house built in New Zealand, under New Zealand building conditions, in the Southern part of the country, where New Zealand arctic weather conditions prevailed. Where even then, earthquakes regularly occurred. Not the enormous level. None, with the intensity of the Napier earthquake of 1931, where the city was massively rebuilt, or the recent dreadful Christchurch earthquakes of 2010/11. For which many are still waiting building and assistance. But houses were generally built a lot thicker, stronger and I have to say better, than many I have since seen in countries all over the world. In fact some of the modern construction methods, workmanship (although to call it that is an insult to many earlier builders) and poor quality of materials, truly scare me. I seriously doubt that many houses built today will be around in one hundred years. They just don’t make them like they used too.

(continued tomorrow)