“This is a story about my husband and I on one of our bus trips, and to put it in context, it’s the early 1980s. BC. Before Children.
“We had the dog, Robin and I. The dog was a little Border Collie cross. Her name was Puppy. She plays an important part in my speech, so bear with me.
“Robin and I were hippies of the 1980s. We turned our back on mainstream society, home ownership, mortgages, fulltime jobs, regular income and all that sort of thing.
“We owned a bus which was our home and our wheels and our lifestyle.
“Our bus was a ‘jailbar’ Ford, wooden-framed with a flathead V8 motor, petrol, big.
“Our lifestyle consisted of part-time work, seasonal work, travelling from place to place, parking in free camping areas, beside the beach, beside the rivers, anywhere you were parked out of sight and out of view of the public.
“This story was one of our journeys between Gisborne and Ōpōtiki.
“We left Gisborne in the afternoon. We preferred to travel late in the day to keep under the radar of the police, and we’d had an uneventful cruise through the back blocks of Poverty Bay, past Te Karaka and inland through remote farmlands, past Mātāwai, very quiet. A very easy cruise, a great quiet, empty road.
“Heading up a big sweeping bend, Robin does the gear change down to third, doubles the clutch (I don’t know what double the clutch means, but you go down twice and pull the gear stick back) and changes down.
“Oh... Oh no! It does not want to go into gear. The motor stalls. The bus starts to roll backwards down the hill.
“Robin slams his foot on the brake and the clutch and with both hands tips back in the driver’s seat and, still with his hand on the steering wheel, proceeds to tip backwards onto the floor behind.
“The bus was still gaining momentum going backwards downhill, no driver, no steering wheel, no control.
“With a scramble, steering wheel in his hand, Robin manages to get back on his seat and put the footbrake on, put on the handbrake and draw this backward-travelling bus to a halt.
“But as the brakes were applied sharply, everything we thought was nicely secured for driving standards was no longer secure.
“It all went flying backwards.
“We had a 30-litre water container that flew through the air. We had a tray of 36 eggs that flew through the air and landed in the doorwell near Puppy the dog.
“When things flew, the door burst open, the dog ran off and there we were stalled on an uphill sweeping bend, daylight fading, no lights, no starter motor and chaos inside the bus.
“Robin managed to reattach the steering wheel, foot planted on the brake, but the only way to start that bus was to jump-start it backwards down the hill, hoping like hell it would fire.
“Robin said to me, ‘Right, you go off down the hill and warn people about the bus.’
“So I had to go running back down to the bottom of the hill... and I was not sure what I was going to do.
“I had to watch from a distance as the bus rolled backwards until Robin let the clutch out, hoping it would fire.
“It did after the second attempt. Then I had to run back up the road.
“Gone. Nowhere to be seen and the light was fading fast.
“But soon we were on our way again, up over the hill, and we managed to find a parking spot in a shingle pit. We stayed the night to do the repairs on the bus, to the steering wheel, the seat, clean up the eggs, clean up the water and the other stuff that had flown around the bus.
“I can chuckle about it now, but at the time it wasn’t quite so funny. It was a bit like a comedy scene that only happens in the movies, except it was quite real.
“We learned some valuable lessons that day - like tighten the steering wheel and the seats.
“The dog turned up the next morning, and she never really wanted to go in that bus again.”
