Ephiphany

I was born in the North Island, on a bright January day during World War Two, just as the bellbirds and fantails began their morning songs. My mother gave birth easily, but as she said later, she was angry bringing another life into a hate-filled world. A few months earlier her father had died at forty-five, worn out from wounds and gas poisoning received during the first World War. As my mother went into labour, her husband, just out of medical school, was leaving on a military convoy bound for the European warfront. I was born the very hour the ships sailed out of the local harbour.

But my mother had little time for sentiment. The Japanese were in control of the Pacific and she needed to get back to war duty. Women were enrolled into service because most of the men had left the country to fight for Britain. My mother patrolled part of the coastline, in an ambulance, on the lookout for enemy submarines. She took a kitchen knife to defend herself.

"Get one yellow devil before he gets you," her superior had commanded.

If my mother had little joy in my birth, my father never even learned of my existence, due to military censorship and sunken transport ships, until I was walking. When he finally received news from my mother, he was in a tent operating on Allied soldiers, as well as German wounded, who had been left behind while both armies fought their way up the Italian peninsula.

My father spent the war with his hands covered in other men's blood. All around him people were starving. Much later, when the Vietnam War was raging on nightly television, he mentioned he should have cared for the undernourished children who hung around the army camps instead of fixing up young men who were sent back to the front to kill, be killed or put in prisoner-of-war camps. I knew only that he was a doctor who looked after bombed, hungry people in Europe.

My memories of that period are vague until one special day that is inscribed in my mind like the passage of lightning through blue sky.

It was early afternoon in summer and I was probably three years old. I sat waiting for "Daddy" on the kitchen table. I knew that his ship had docked the night before because in my grandmother's house, where I lived, the arrival of the fleet was the only topic of conversation. The house had been cleaned until everyone was groaning about sore knees and aching backs, and my brother and I were forbidden to eat the biscuits which were coming out of the oven by the tray-load.

Up until then I had never had any close contact with a man. My father was a uniformed image on my mother's chest-of-drawers. For several weeks I had watched her carefully embroider pimk and yellow rosebuds on a new dress she was making for me. Sometimes she cried out when her thread broke.

"Damn the war and damn all men," she swore as she jerked another bit of recycled cotton between her fingers.

Conscious of the importance of the day, I sat obediently, wiggling my clean toes. One of my aunts had scrubbed the tar off my feet; I rarely wore sandals, which were expensive and difficult to obtain because they were made overseas. The sun came in through the open door in shafts of dappled light, and I smelled the hydrangea bushes planted along the back path.

The soft material of my new dress caressed my sunburnt skin. As I raised my knees it billowed against my legs. Delicate rosebuds danced all over.

Suddenly the sunlight disappeared, blocked out by someone standing at the door. I looked up and saw a stranger. Gravely we stared at one another. The eyes. I knew those eyes. They were green like the bellies of waves which crashed onto the beach after a storm.

The stranger came to life. Before I could move, he ran over and lifted me up. I buried my nose deep in the hollow of the warm brown skin above is shirt collar. He smelled so differently from anyone I had ever known. We broke out into laughter as we spun around the kitchen together.

"Why didn't you tell me she was beautiful?" were the first words I heard my father say.

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