My best friend has recently moved back to Tawa, where both he and I grew up together.
I returned to Tawa 18 months ago and he’s experiencing those strange re-entry encounters that come from returning to this Pleasantville-like suburb, nestled between a women’s prison at its southern border and a mental hospital at its northern border, with seven churches down its Main Road.
You find that people don’t actually leave Tawa (or, if they try to, they return.) So you meet people, like your former German teacher, in the bookstore; or find that your former colleagues in the supermarket or petrol station where you worked as a school student are still working there.
Before you know it, you’re saying ‘Gutentag Frau Saxton’ and ‘May we O Lord do justly’, the refrain of the College liturgy (which, when were at school, was often paraphrased into something altogether different).
It’s like you change into this teenage boy with short pants and long socks, a spotty face and a voice that’s somewhere between basso profundo and soprano-in-the-choir.
And all the shopkeepers remember who you are. Partly (in my case) that’s because I’m a third-generation Tawanese. My father was born in Tawa and went to the same primary and secondary schools and even had the same teachers, albeit a generation apart. My paternal grandparents built their house in Tawa, walked on its gravelled roads as it grew from being a post-world war two suburb to being, well, a bigger post-world war two suburb, and stayed there for forty years. And, on my maternal side, I’m part of one of the famous Tawa families. There’s no escape, I tell you. No escape.
So I can walk into the chemist or the mechanics and, straight away, they know who I am. ‘Butcher’, they’ll say. ‘I knew your grandfather.’ Or ‘I remember when your father was your age’. Or ‘I went through primary school with your father’. Or ‘I remember when Noah said to me ‘Jim, I’m building this here ark…’
It’s like the moment you drive past the Tawa sign, you enter this timewarp, this vortex where time stands still and it’s like a 50′s TV sitcom all over again. The cry ‘honey, I’m home!’ is heard at 6pm every night as civil servants return from their days gliding on and their wives greet them, along with their 2.5 children and family dog Fido, as they sit down to meat-and-three-veg and listen to The Archers on the wireless.
‘There’s no time like the present’ they say and Tawa’s definitely in no time like the present. People get older, to be sure. They get married, get greyer, but they’re still there. In this place, time slows down so that ‘the good old days’ go on and on here in Tawa, that place so many of us call home.
