The Saga of Wasp and other Stories

By Dave Mullan

These stories were first inspired by the author’s father’s own remarkable effort in putting together his life story. Bill taught himself to type at 80 and No Standing Stone was published soon after and revised and enlarged a decade or two later. Dave was fascinated with what they turned up as they dug into his past. Born in 1909, Bill could relate in a lot of interesting detail many experiences that were no longer possible for anyone 80 or 90 years later.
Then Dave realised that he too had some distinctive experience, especially in the dying arts of the indigenous forest of this country in the 1950s. So the first few stories in this book were written out of his diaries of those years. His anecdotes speak of swinging a slasher or repairing a broken survey chain, measuring a giant rimu tree, experimenting with a rifle, cooking over an open fire and endless trekking through rough bush tracks in some of New Zealand’s remote forest —not to mention his trials with the inimitable Wasp.
Once he got started it was easy to write about other other events just for fun so his ability to avoid physical education classes in high school for the best part of two years is documented for the first time. His first year at work featured some substantial but hitherto unexplained explosions that occurred in Wellington in 1952. And he speaks candidly of aspects of life in Trinity Theological College and a certain event involving chocolate fudge.
Forty years’ experience of church ministry also have a contribution or two to make in these pages. Mostly based on fact, but usually a little whimsical, these tales have trickled along in odd moments whenever Dave had a bit of time to spare and could put his hands on a keyboard. They pick up some of the amusing highlights of his varied life that was later documented in his much more comprehensive In and Out of Sync.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dave Mullan
• Release date: Feb 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781877357152

Dave Mullan

Retired Presbyter of Methodist Church of New Zealand. Passionate pioneer in Local Shared Ministry, consultant in small churches, publisher of over 100 niche market books, producer of prosumer video, deviser of murder mystery dinners and former private pilot. I trained for the Methodist Ministry at Trinity Theological College and eventually completed MA, Dip Ed as well. Bev and I married just before my first appointment in Ngatea where our two children arrived. We went on to Panmure and Taumarunui. Longer terms followed at Dunedin Central Mission and the Theological College. During this time I was also involved as co-founder and second national President of Family Budgeting Services and adviser to the (government) Minister of Social Welfare. My final four years were part-time, developing the first Presbyterian or Methodist Local Shared Ministry unit in this country and promoting the concept overseas. Retirement has brought a whole lot more opportunities and challenges. We are now living in our own villa in Hibiscus Coast Residential Village.

Book preview

The Saga of Wasp

and Other Stories

Dave Mullan

e-Book edition, Smashwords 2015

ISBN 1-877357-15-2

ColCom Press

28/101 Red Beach Road,

Hibiscus Coast, Aotearoa-New Zealand 0932

[e-mail]

Copyright 2015 Dave Mullan

Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Dedication

Even as I type this, Bev,

you are busy in our new kitchen,

stirring up something that

will be great to eat….

For all the hours I have been

shut up at the computer

while you held our modest

household together,

Thank you

Table of Contents

Preface

School Days

—How to avoid physical education

Light the Blue Touch Paper

—Explosives in the CBD

Heating Things Up

—Winter in a forestry hut

Chain of Events

—Surveying in the bush

The Culinary Bushman

—Amateur cook in a bush shanty

Taking a Bead

—Rifles I have owned

In Praise of Frosts

—Driving to work in the bush

Ruapehu

—Tongariro and Ngauruhoe on five grapefruit

Technological Virgin

—Be careful with tape recorders

Off the Back of a Truck

—I swear it tried to kill me

An Easter Reminiscence

—Wellington Young Men’s Easter Camp 1955

The John McGlashan Waterfall

—Youth Conference

College Capers

—Life in the Theological College

The Mile Must Go Through

—Vacation job with the Post Office

To Catch a Mouse

—Managing while Bev is away from home

Nanaimo Bar

—Another adventure in cookery

Let’s Change the Tune

—Choosing the hymns for Sunday

Phoning Home

—Communications in the United States

Fawlty Towers, BC

—Restless night in a hotel

Do you take?

—Wedding celebrant blues

Napier Holiday

—The key to the vacation accommodation problem

Medium Rare, Please

—Taking the waters at Ngawha hot springs

Farewell at Conference

—Our first attempt at stand-up comedy

How Times Have Changed

—Three generations of child minding

The Sydney Car Chase

—Just follow me—you’ll be right

Under the Rakaia Bridge

—No place to spend the night

Balinese Guest House

—Promotional spoof

Kegel Exercises

—Preparation for surgery

On a Scale of One to Ten....

—Advice for the surgical ward

Alarming experience

—Strange noises in the night

Text Mess-aging

—Oldies learning SMS

Do not Write Down Your Password

—Letter to the bank about passwords

The Saga of Wasp

—My very first car

About the Author

—And his work and writing

Dave’s General Books

Dave’s Church and Ministry Books

Preface

There's not much to say about these stories really. They were inspired firstly by Dad's own remarkable effort in putting together his life story. He taught himself to type at 80 and we published No Standing Stone soon after. I was really fascinated with what we turned up as we dug into his past. He seemed to have had so many experiences that are no longer possible for anyone these days.

Then I began to realise that I too had some distinctive experience, especially in the dying arts of the indigenous forest of this country. And once I got started I found there were other current events worth writing about just for fun. So these tales have been allowed to trickle along in odd moments whenever I've had a bit of time to spare and could put my hands on a keyboard.

A couple of efforts were somewhat tentatively submitted for magazine publication. One was actually accepted for publication by The Listener. Two months later a different person sent the MS back with a note regretting that they had decided not to use it as it was a little too orotund for their readership.

Gosh, orotund! I had to think about that. As a novice writer I couldn't afford to inflict anything like that on the Listener's respective readers, could I? Actually, I didn't know what he meant. And if I was so stupid I didn't know what orotund prose was when I'd actually written it myself, I'd obviously got into pretty deep water.

So, as I have found many times before, publishing your stuff yourself is the only answer. You, Dear Reader, now have before you a revised edition of a Collector's Piece of rare quality. You can be sure it'll be rare, anyway—in 1991 I printed only enough of the first edition to meet our Christmas gift requirements for the next year or two.

Happily, some recipients found it more interesting than the average Christmas card and we found a copy or two for their friends. In 2014 an enlarged edition was produced with much advanced publishing technology. Now this e-version becomes the apotheosis of my modest publishing career.

And—for the moment—it’s free!

Dave Mullan

ColCom Press

Hibiscus Coast Village

28/101 Red Beach Rd

Red Beach, 0932

Aotearoa-New Zealand

March 2015

School Days — 1951

I'm not a very physical person. Not in an organised way, anyway.

I wasn't too bad at softball thanks to pleasurable hours of coaching at home from Dad. He could hardly spare the time but probably saw a need to encourage some kind of physical activity in his recalcitrant son. So softball was OK. But certainly not rugby football, thank you very much. A game for hooligans, I thought. And in High School, when Physical Education began to get serious, I responded to that part of the official curriculum with an equally serious desire to avoid it.

Happily, at some stage in my fourth form year I grew a massive verruca on the edge of one foot. I can't now remember which foot it was on now, which is rather strange because I really owed it an enormous amount. It must have sprouted out of a psychological need. It served me well.

Every week I had to take it to Lower Hutt to Miss Page and sit in her great chair while she chopped and cut and scraped at it and then put some smelly ointment on it in a hole in a padded bandage and bound everything up together. It was fairly painful—especially when walking towards the gym for PE. And the treatment itself was no sinecure, either. But it was worth enduring all this discomfort for what went with it: a note excusing me from physical activities of all kinds. Undated!

I was fit enough to bike three or four kilometres to school, to run round the grounds during the lunch hour, to walk endlessly around Lower Hutt shops admiring toy cars that I would like to have (I did get one once; it was bright green with black guards—a Lagonda Sports)chasing my younger brother and sisters around the house and beating them up when the occasion seemed to warrant it, and various other vigorous activities. But I was not fit enough to participate in Physical Education. The note said so. And it had no sunset clause incorporated in it.

At first I hung around the gym with others who had also scored a written excuse (What's the trouble today, Mullan—got your period?) but it was pretty boring. I mean, if you don't like dragging your weight up to chin height on a beam, endangering your vital parts by extravagant leaps over a horse or tumbling purposelessly forwards and backwards on mats that have long since lost any softness they once might have had in them it's not much fun watching others do these things. And, if you do take some enjoyment out of watching all this frenetic stuff from the sideline and you show your pleasure in any way, they're liable to give you hell afterwards. So I explored some alternative venues for my prolonged spell of Excused PE.

A couple of other mates who probably had less excuse than I did were of a similar mind about PE and we considered various options that might be open to us around the school. Once or twice we actually left the grounds and went off up town but this was a very tricky business; we were very conspicuous in our school uniform so it was better to stay off the streets altogether. Even around the school we were liable to be accosted by people who might have taken upon themselves the right to judge whether or not we were where we should be. So there was a bit of a problem.

The school's laboratories proved to be our answer. Each had a secluded store room at the back and it didn't take long to check out which lab was free during our PE periods. It was then easy to move in and make ourselves quietly and comfortably at home in the back room for the period. A cupboard there contained a 35mm filmstrip projector and boxes of those latest aids in the educational development of the younger generation. We feasted on all sorts of material from rather boring history to rather more interesting biology, especially where it involved the human species. And PE came to be a much-anticipated period in our timetable.

The written authorisation for me to not attend PE was accompanied by bandaged evidence for several weeks but not long enough to suit my personal tastes. However, the instructor never called a roll and just accepted whoever drifted along to the class. He just seemed to have an idea that the numbers were about right. And I was absent with a good excuse for a pretty long time. Come to think of it, perhaps there were two or three there who were dodging biology because they preferred PE. Anyway, it had become a habit and I didn't attend again for the rest of my time in school.

Of course, when the whole school had to go on a long-distance jog around what seemed like most of the Hutt Valley it was inevitable that I should turn out to be a poor performer. But this simply confirmed my judgement that such activities were not for me.

Of course, there were other things to do in school. I spent an awful lot of my time getting beaten up by various people. Some of them would wander around the grounds obviously wondering what to do with the rest of the lunch hour. A glimpse of me and their problem was solved:

Hey, let's beat up Mullan.

No, let's get his trousers off and see if we can name the parts.

Either way, I didn't care for it and tried to be somewhere else most of the time.

I volunteered for the Air Training Cadets as it seemed that they did a little less square-bashing than the Army Cadets. Though that would have been no great problem as I enjoyed drill in Boys' Brigade and our Company often scored well in the Battalion Competitions. I got to spend a couple of sessions on the old rifle range with very dubious .22 rifles on which I couldn't give any kind of satisfactory performance. Our Unit visited Paraparaumu Control Tower once and actually saw an aircraft land there (I say, chaps, said Fish Salmond, our enthusiastic teacher—who surely must have been ex-RAF—There's a DC3 expected to arrive in half an hour; we can stay and see it if you like.

Big deal—while camping at Paraparaumu Beach that summer holidays I'd biked down to the airfield, walked through the terminal building—such as it was in the 1940s—and out to a Lockheed Electra on the apron. Accosted by absolutely no one I climbed aboard and took Box Brownie photographs of the cockpit layout. I should post them on my blog.

One of the things we spent a little while with in Cadets was a World War I battery-operated signalling kit. I had learned Morse code from a former Post and Telegraph operator in Boys' Brigade so this equipment was a fascinating outfit. The lamp was set up on a tripod and could be focussed precisely to communicate over a distance of several kilometres in good conditions.

Once we appropriated two of these heavy units—they were optimistically labelled portable— and lugged them to our respective homes for the night. George and Russ climbed onto the roof of George's Petone home and Ken Stevenson and I went up the rough road to the Epuni Reservoir. Ken had been allowed to come out only on the understanding that he was to be home by 8pm. Something about homework, I suppose. No wonder he did so well in education later on.

Anyway, by the time we had got up the hill, rigged up our equipment and identified our partner light blinking faintly among all the lights that even then flooded the valley, time was getting on. We spent a lot of time sending AR I have a message for you and K Go on and so forth but eventually our first successful transmission took place: Dah-Dit Dit-Dit (i.e. NI telegraphic shorthand for Good Night. Then ensued a long exchange for which the P&T didn't have enough abbreviations. Apparently they never had to say to another telegram operator anything like: Thanks for the chat but I'm sorry I have to knock off now and go and get my homework done. But we did and into the bargain we were frozen to the bone crouching over the ancient gear. But as we rode off home in the frosty night we were satisfied that if the security of the city depended only on visual communications at night we could fill the bill if asked. There'll be no danger of a sudden invasion on Petone Beach in a power cut—Mullan and his team will establish communications and save the good people of the Valley from disaster.

We'd had no difficulty in removing the signalling units from the stores. We'd just forgotten to put them back after a Cadet exercise one day. Nobody checked. But it was a lot more difficult to get them back in. Eventually, being unwilling to physically break into the store, we had to confess up, saying untruthfully that they'd been left around the place for a few days.

One PE period we were discovered in the back room of the lab. It was the only occasion when we'd found the cupboard containing our projector was locked. Darned cheek, we thought. We had got hinges off with a screwdriver and were absorbed in our usual show when Pop Marwick walked in and went to the cupboard where he had locked some examination papers for next day. To say he was dismayed to find the door off the hinges would be to put it very mildly. Fortunately the papers weren't for us and he grumped and growled a bit and went on his way.

We carried on undisturbed in the lab room for the rest of the year. But I thought about it a lot. Some appreciation seemed called for. So, noting that Pop coached the bottom team in hockey I joined it out of gratitude. I really hope he appreciated my sacrificial offering.

Light the Blue Touch Paper — 1952

When a sharp explosion shook the downstairs office where Bev worked in Wellington's Featherston St her boss was all set to call the police. The windows had rattled vigorously and flakes of plaster fell round the place. By all accounts it was all very exciting. The more worked up he became the more Bev’s face became red. She had some idea about what had happened.

I was introduced to explosives in the course of absolutely legitimate but quite novel pursuits. As a fifth former I had been offered some casual Saturday employment with Les Ingram's well-known Home Services in Lower Hutt. We pootled around in his battered but venerable Model A wagon and attended on those who were rich enough to pay us but not rich enough to afford permanent gardeners. An excellent drystone retaining wall for the venerable Todd sisters' garden sticks in my memory as one of the most significant enterprises of my working Saturdays.

We dug gardens at a steady rate of ten square yards an hour on reasonable going. We cut hedges by hand. Les had one