And conversation stopped while we watched a televised race from Melbourne that featured one of their progeny. It came ninth. They’re watching the rugby now, too.
The All Black half back scores and cheers erupt from all three units, and we throw open our doors to share the celebration. Then someone says the try’s been disallowed and we all go back inside and close our doors again. When the final whistle blows we silence our televisions at the same moment. I go to walk it off.
Havelock North has an abundance of cute cafes and boutiques. Some of the boutiques have French names, one has a single snakeskin shoe on display in the window, and most offer floral dresses for the fuller figure.
There are interior design shops, too, crammed with antiques and retro furnishings, and upstairs offices advertise a range of financial advisors and wealth management services. The flip side of all this is the spine clinic and the dermatologist’s and the denture shop.
Beside the central roundabout a young woman is standing with a placard and a home-made Palestinian flag. The few people about are emphatically paying her no attention.
The Anglican St Luke’s church is bang in the centre of town. A little further out - not much, but enough to make the point - stands the Presbyterian St Columba’s. Through a window I see a white robed priest at the altar and an elderly few in the pews.
At the far end of the village green the Redemption Point church looks a lot less church-like, a lot more evangelical and a lot better patronised. I toy with the idea of going in to be appalled but dismiss it without difficulty.
Keen for some exercise I follow signs to the Catholic church, pushed well beyond the town centre in the days when these things mattered. It does not seem busy. Nor yet does the strange-looking Remnant Church of the Living God.
I circle back into town and by now Havelock North has forgotten the rugby. The playground is packed with parents and children. And on the village green a dozen men and women are standing in a wide circle like the numbers on a clock face. E
ach has a puppy on a leash. In the centre of the circle a woman is explaining the principles of dog training, and the owners are listening in an orderly manner. The puppies are not. They are straining at the leashes, pawing the air, yapping, desperate to be disorderly.
A gum tree towers above everything, magisterially vast, dwarfing the spires of the churches. Pigeons swoop about its branches. Half way up hangs a pink and purple kite.
I pause at a real-estate window to be astonished by the prices, but no prices are marked. ‘You can’t beat the old bungalows,’ says a voice. It belongs to a man who tells me how he was raised in a bungalow, how his daughter owns a bungalow, how they don’t make bungalows like that any more. And did I watch the rugby and am I perhaps a little grumpy? ‘Perhaps,’ I say.
The woman with the Palestinian flag has left her post. Further on I ask a woman with a tiny dog whether there’s a supermarket in Havelock North. She smiles sweetly and says, ‘I’ve got short-term memory loss.’ Then adds, ‘but I think there may be one down there.’
There isn’t.
