Back to Anatori: One Woman's Experience of a Small, Rural Town in New Zealand

By Henriette Fleischer

Bridget Coleman has just turned fifty. Her mother has recently died and she has inherited enough money to enable her to leave her long-time career as an English teacher, put a failed relationship behind her and make some sweeping changes in her life. She moves to a small rural township in an isolated, remote part of New Zealand, sets herself up as a ‘life coach’ and gets part-time work in a local café.

She gradually becomes an accepted part of this small, rural community… a community that expresses the common human desires for connection, love, survival, peace, creativity and spiritual evolution … a community that struggles with anger, fear, poverty, stifling social convention, senseless laws, old age, and unconventional sexual needs.

Bridget is a self-aware, thoughtful, kind, courageous woman, living alone, but she is never alone. The surprising and remarkable events and relationships that she becomes involved in during her twelve months in the township change, enrich and develop her own soul and spirit in ways she could never have imagined.

Although content with her single, celibate state, Bridget’s personal life presents some surprising opportunities for love, connection, and reconnection.

This story is a frank and sensitive depiction of the hidden, inner life of rural New Zealand society and how this affects and changes one woman. It is artistically and symbolically interwoven with the stunning natural scenery, rich bird life, rivers, sea, mountains, forest and gardens of this magical part of New Zealand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781489503107

Book preview

BACK TO ANATORI

Henriette Fleischer

Dedication

This book is dedicated to all my women friends who have shared with me and helped me to survive the experience of living alone.

Disclaimer:

The people and events in this book are purely fictional. Any resemblance to real people and events is entirely coincidental and completely unintentional.

The place-names, natural settings, buildings and landscapes, however, are real.

1.

Bridget drove into Collingwood on a Friday in the heat of February. The small, quaint township in the far north-west of Golden Bay, at the top of the South Island of New Zealand, was going to be her new home and playground in life. As her little car curved around and down the hill and the magnificent beauty of the Aorere Estuary came into view, her heart started beating a little faster. She was on the brink of an exciting adventure and pangs of fear were mingled with happy anticipation.

Bridget’s eyes darted around to take in all the new sights, new and yet, oh so familiar. She surveyed the main street: the fire station, the museum, the large garage which was the base for the Farewell Spit tours, the old Post Office building (now a second-hand furniture shop with the owner living in a flat at the back), the ‘tea rooms’, the hotel, the Public Hall, the grocery store, a few houses and some motels. She was looking forward to perusing the second-hand furniture store to find the things she would need to furnish her house. That was all there was to Collingwood. Well, almost. On the hill directly behind the township, out of sight, stood the Collingwood Area School and a whole long street of houses, half-hidden in the bush, overlooking the township, the estuary and the bay.

Bridget wondered if she would settle here for the rest of her life, maybe even die here …

The cottage she had bought six weeks earlier was old and quaint, settled on a section behind the Courthouse Café, right at the beginning of the main street. Bridget stood in front of it and took in every detail, greeting it as if it had a personality … a soul. It was clad in painted weatherboard and crowned with a colonial-red corrugated iron roof. There was a little veranda in front and an enclosed porch you had to walk through to get inside, into a tiny kitchen with a red Formica sink bench and imitation wood wall-board she wasn’t sure she would be able to live with. They would have to be painted over. There were three bedrooms, and fairly new carpet covered the uneven timber floors. Small windows looked out onto an old-fashioned garden and the road that led to the beach. The lounge, to her delight, had old, wooden French doors opening out onto the veranda and faced west, to catch the golden afternoon and setting sun. Sitting there, she would be able to take in the breathtaking view of the Wakamarama Range, rolled out majestically in the west. She would be able to enjoy the sun setting over these dark hills in the evening, often casting an orange glow over the township or painting the estuary blood-red. She imagined herself sunk into an old, cane chair, relaxed and happy, a cup of tea or glass of ginger wine in her hand, reflecting on her day.

Her hands trembling, she inserted the key into the front door and stepped into the house. It smelt musty from having sat empty for one winter. Its last occupant, old Mrs Dallimore, had moved into the Rest Home on the hill at the beginning of winter, having lived there alone for fifteen lonely years after her husband died. The walls were papered in 1950’s wallpaper. It was ever so humble. But three adequate bedrooms meant Bridget could have friends and family to stay. Maybe even paying guests ...

Mrs Dallimore’s presence still hung around a bit, she felt, but she thought it could be dissipated quickly with some fresh air and her own energies, thoughts and feelings. She had made the right choice, or maybe she’d been guided here … Quaint. Quaint. Quaint, had been the overstatement on the real estate agent’s leaflet. Nearly a hundred years old, private, sheltered, rarely found these days. Bridget was in agreement.

The garden had many established shrubs and trees: tall tree-ferns, old fashioned, dark pink hydrangeas, heavenly-scented daphne, a crimson camellia, a rambling pale yellow rose and a mauve wisteria framing the porch. Of course, the daphne and wisteria had long since flowered. The cottage was a beige colour and behind it was a small stand of native bush … a remnant of a forest that once must have covered much of the land where the township now stands. Bellbirds, tuis, native pigeons, warblers, fantails and wax-eyes were always around, Bridget had noticed. And one could always hear seagulls and oystercatchers just a hundred metres away, plaintively crying over the beach and the bay.

Bridget viewed the house as an old lady who would have seen and heard much within the confines of her walls. Births and deaths, marriage break-ups, heart-aches, fights, worries, celebrations, joys and lonely times. Longings, wishes, dreams, laughter and regrets. And now it was Bridget’s turn to enter and show the old lady some new things. A part of her chuckled at the thought. Shocking things? She was, after all, a modern woman - if a woman in her early fifties could be called that. She was single, child-free, self-reliant, independent, self-confident and, maybe, even sexually liberated. She wasn’t sure about that last one. Although Mrs Dallimore would surely think so if she knew Bridget’s past, in which a fair number of lovers and partners had come and gone.

But now it was time to be by herself - alone in the world. Well, for a while anyway. It felt like the right thing at this point in her life. She had just turned fifty and resigned from her long years of teaching English. She was undoubtedly at a turning point in her life. She felt as if she stood at the beginning of a new period of adventure and unprecedented freedom.

She put down two large bags containing some clothes and precious items, (a valuable painting, a sculpture, jewellery), on the floor of the living room, opened all the windows and doors and entered every room with a greeting and a critical look around. Her friend Holly would be arriving soon with a van-load of her possessions: her stereo, photographs, paintings, lamps, crockery and cutlery, pots and pans, a heater and other electrical appliances, and some bedding so she could sleep in the cottage that night. She was going to buy all her furniture from the second-hand shop in the village.

Bridget decided to waste no time and, after turning on the power, headed for the shop, driven by the need for a bed to sleep in that night.

2.

The second-hand store was typical of small, rural New Zealand towns. Smelling of dust and old wooden furniture, rimu, oak and mahogany, all stacked up tight against each other with little room to manoeuvre between. Every step Bridget took through that store had her excited with anticipation of finding something she was going to love.

And she did. She walked out of the store an hour later knowing that she had what it took to turn the empty cottage into a home: an old oak double bed with rubber mattress, a small, oval, wooden dining table with four chairs, a chest of drawers, an old-fashioned, rolled-back sofa, a coffee table, bookcase and a wall unit. That was all she needed for the time being, until she had painted the walls of the spare bedrooms and could furnish them. The only thing she could not find was a desk ... an old, wooden one with drawers was what she had set her heart on. The owner of the shop, who introduced himself as Joe, offered to ring her if one came in. He said he would load her furniture onto his pick-up truck and deliver them in an hour.

So what brings you here to this corner of the woods? the slightly-dishevelled-looking man of sssssssindefinable age had asked with a good country accent, his deep-set eyes twinkling with curiosity.

Bridget had trouble thinking of an answer, because she wasn’t that sure herself of what had brought her here. Something had lured her back to this place, almost at the end of a long country highway that winds its way around the coastline to the most north-western extremity of the South Island. Some mysterious longing had pulled her there - a line of energy connecting her to the beach and the hills, the Aorere River, flanked by the Wakamarama Range, the expansive Ruataniwha Estuary and the sweeping body of gentle, flat sea that was Golden Bay. And even further, inland across winding, wind-swept hills and past the Whanganui Harbour on the west coast, she was pulled by the distant memory of a place where a river called the Anatori emerged from forested hills to join the vast Tasman Sea rolling in on white-crested waves, onto a wide, windswept beach strewn with driftwood.

Twenty-five years ago, she had walked that beach with her first lover and boyfriend, the blond-haired and wild Jimmy, as they toured the South Island in their van. They had laughed and giggled and rough-and-tumbled on the warm sand and swum in the pounding surf. They had sat by a fire on the beach, under a February full moon, their feet touching as they sang and talked and shared their dreams. Bridget had fallen in love with the place and with Jimmy. The memory of both were exquisitely and indelibly etched in her psyche.

It was under this full moon in this magical place, that they had conceived their son. They had been together for five years and Bridget had made a unilateral decision that she was ready to have a child. She had been a teacher for two years and felt ready, but whenever she broached the subject, Jimmy would laugh at her. He was not, he told her. So, she’d not told him that she‘d stopped taking the contraceptive pill.

Soon after the birth of their son, Daniel, Jimmy, not at all ready for fatherhood and a steady job, had left her. He did not tell her where he had gone and left no phone number. She struggled with the role of single mother, the months passing painfully slowly and each day was marked by a crying bout and overshadowed by the cloud of post-natal depression that made the whole world grey, no matter how blue the skies and how bonny the baby. The magic of that time under the full moon on the beach at Anatori became a distant memory tinged with regret.

A year later, Jimmy came back to live nearby. He started to visit quite frequently, curious and undeniably attracted to his baby son, whom he seemed to enjoy and want a real relationship with. During the year that followed, free from the drudgery of domestic slavery that the baby subjected Bridget to, he would come and take away young Danny, as they called him, to give her a break, leaving her half drowning at home in her pool of depression. Bridget had ended up seeing a doctor and was put on anti-depressant medication. Thus began the years of emotional flatness and indifference, of just managing to meet the minimal demands of motherhood.

The day that Jimmy did not come back with Danny did not even hurt that badly. She had slept most of that day and had been rudely pulled out of her torpor when she read the letter he had popped in her mailbox. You are not fit to be his mother and I think it is best for both you and Danny that he live with me now. Come and see him whenever you want.

Her sad life was now emptier than ever.

The years that followed were a blur. She had several admissions to hospital after suicide ideation and the doctors were forever adjusting the amount and type of anti-depressant medication. She saw less and less of Danny and when she heard that he had gone out of her life totally, his father having taken him to Australia to live without telling her where, she was alarmed to notice that she felt no pain.

The years went by. Bridget recovered from her depression and returned to teaching. She was rebuilding her life. Her son became just a memory, but she knew that one day she would see him again. She did not want to track him down in Australia and subject him and herself to heartbreak and trauma by reconnecting with him and then having to leave him again. She thought this would be better for all of them.

Now she found herself here, where the sweeping beach curved into the mountain backdrop, by the calm waters of Golden Bay, not far from where her son was conceived. It was as if, in doing so, she was re-connecting with him. She hoped and dreamed that impossible possibility that maybe one day, like a godwit who instinctively knows its way back to New Zealand in spring, after spending the winter months on the coast of Alaska, he would come and revisit the place of his origin and they would find each other again

3.

Of course there was no way she could have shared all this with old Joe. He had asked her a question. She managed to come up with an answer of sorts.

Time for a new start … and I’ve always loved this part of New Zealand. That is all she gave away. She could see he would have liked more information. Bridget wasn’t sure about this man. He was shifty-eyed … possibly due, she thought, to shyness. Maybe he was suspicious of strangers, especially single, mature, independent women.

And it was true, in a way … about the new start. She’d had enough of teaching and got out before she became burnt out. She said goodbye to meetings, reports, behaviour-challenged students, duties and long hours at night and in the weekend marking and preparing lessons. Bridget’s mother had died and left her an inheritance that enabled her to resign and spend a few years exploring other ways of earning money, living in the place of her choice. Her last relationship had come to an end just weeks before, when she had caught her man, finally, walking on the beach, arm-in-arm with his new woman, confirming a growing suspicion that had been keeping her awake at night for some months. She decided, in the depth of her soul, that that would be the last for a while. It was time for a break from relationships. She had had enough of the continual dramas, the compromises, the ins and outs and ups and downs.

Her life-long friend, Holly, had asked her, over coffee in a café in Nelson, what she was going to do to earn a crust in Collingwood. The answer came as a surprise to both of them.

I thought I might set myself up as a ‘life-coach’.

What’s a life-coach? Holly asked, a hint of disapproval in her voice. Not one of those people who claim to have their lives totally figured out and think they know how to help others get theirs sorted!

Well, Bridget had retorted. "I know I don’t have my life totally figured out, as you say, but I have a pretty good idea of how I can make myself and others feel that we have!"

Her brazenness shocked Holly, whose totally pragmatic view of life made her a realist ‘par excellence’. To prove it, she had married a down-to-earth (literally) dairy farmer in the Aorere Valley, where for the last ten years she lived a comfortable life with him and her three children, two of whom were at school. Money was never short and her husband Phil expected no more from her than to raise the kids, cook and bake for them and keep a clean house and tidy garden. She was not an idealist and found her recreation in reading large numbers of easy-to-read romance novels. But she was undoubtedly a good friend to Holly, always staying with her whenever she came to Nelson to do some shopping, or when she and her family had their yearly winter holidays at the ski field to the south of this city.

Your entrepreneurship is astonishing! But somehow I can believe that you just might be able to pull this one off. You are an attentive listener and you are good at making others feel they can do what they really want and at helping them to see what that might be. But for goodness, sake, Bridget, be careful not to get witch-hunted out of Collingwood!

Heartened by Holly’s encouragement and faith in her, Bridget had gone home and the idea had never left her since. It grew to the point where she was quite convinced that this was something she could be a success at. But there was no way she was going to study and get a qualification, so there was no alternative than to pretend, in an innocent sort of way. She would have no false diploma or certificate on her wall. She would just advertise in The Golden Bay Weekly and her clients could judge her ability for themselves. As far as she knew, it wasn’t illegal.

So she walked from the second-hand dealer’s back to her cottage with the spring of confidence in her step. She was here! The place she had always dreamt of returning to! She turned her eyes up to the deep violet-blue Golden Bay sky and watched a large gull circling on a thermal, high up above the township. She felt as light and as strong as this gull, carried by an invisible force that defied gravity ... oh, so free.

Holly arrived with her van full of Bridget’s stuff soon after, but needed to get back to her kids coming home from school, so she left Bridget to put away her things in cupboards and drawers. Joe came with the furniture later in the afternoon and didn’t waste any time taking a good, if furtive look at her belongings. He was no doubt trying hard to get some clues about her past, her career, her relationship status. Bridget hoped he would not surmise too much.

Sorry about not having a desk for you, he said. And by the looks of the boxes of books in the hall, you’re going to need another bookshelf too. Keen reader, are you?

All Bridget gave him in reply was a thin smile and a nod.

Dinner was fish and chips from the hotel. To her delight, they were very good. The fish was fresh cod, probably caught by a local fisherman on the West Coast. Bridget remembered that coastline and the Whanganui Harbour, reached after an hour of driving through the hills from the east coast just north of Collingwood. The west coast beaches south of the harbour were wild and remote. She remembered driving that road with Jimmy as far as it went, to Anatori - that magical place she had every intention of going to visit again.

That night she went to sleep quickly, quite exhausted, on the new bed Joe had delivered and helped set up, her window kept open to allow the fresh night air in. In the distance was the plaintive screeching of the spur-winged plover, the only bird she knew of, apart from an owl, that called at night. It felt to her like a warning, that not all would be easy and good in her new life here.

She was too tired to realize that she was missing out on a spectacular February full moon rising on the horizon, reflected in the still, dark waters of the bay.

4.

Bridget’s first full day in her new home dawned fine and clear and promised to be a hot one. Barefooted, wearing only a wrap-around, silk skirt and tee shirt, she opened all the windows and doors, installed her stereo and put on some of her favourite music, controlling an urge to play it quite loud. She didn’t want to antagonise any neighbours. After breakfast, she started to unpack and put away kitchenware.

Around mid-morning, she heard a knock on her opened French doors and a head popped around the doorway of her kitchen. Friendly, twinkling blue eyes behind strong-lensed, black-rimmed glasses looked at her from a face that was wrinkled and framed in softly-curled, thin, grey hair. Lipsticked lips smiled and introduced her neighbour, June. Bridget took her to be around 75 years old. A frail-framed lady, she stooped slightly and leant on a walking stick with her left hand, holding a plate of