Mr Potter said, "They are waiting for us all to die, so they can move Islanders into our street. But we won't die!"


There was a murmur of assent from the Semple Street group.

Mrs Potter was happily pouring tea from a china pot, serving sliced tomato on water crackers, the last of the Christmas cake, and she was finally getting rid of the biscuits from the City Council Pensioners Christmas Gift Parcel.

"We have to defend ourselves," Mr Potter said ringingly, his RSA badge glistening on the lapel of' his green Harris Tweed sports coat.

Mr Bourne was whittling with his pocket knife, mumbling to himself. Whittling what? It appeared to be a dagger.

It was ugly.

Mrs Ogilvie had cream on the end of her nose, Mr Hopkirk had dropped a slice of' tomato on his best grey flannel trousers, and his wife was busily sponging with her handkerchief', in a most intimate spot.

Mr Vernall who had been a union delegate in his working days was making notes with a pen and nib he'd stolen years ago from a post office, and he still felt guilty. The pen made blobs of ink on the pad.

There was muttering about a protest to the Social Security Department - the people had never become accustomed to the change of name to Department of Social Welfare.

It was suggested they could write to the Minister of Social Welfare, but he was a young man, he probably wouldn't understand.

Why had the State Advances, the predecessor of the Housing Corporation, put all those new people together?

For decades an area of vacant ground with a right of way, suddenly called Pacific Way, seemed to mushroom overnight with new houses, but that's how it was these days, changes were sudden. The houses had gone up too quickly, overnight, and everybody knew that New Zealanders did not erect houses overnight, it took weeks and months, and there should have been offcuts of timber for firewood, and nails, and maybe paint and wallpaper that they could use, and cups of tea and yarns with carpenters, but there was none of that.

Suddenly, the houses were there.

When the old trucks arrived with the new residents belongings there was resentment, and the old people of Semple Street watched plaited pandanus mats, pillows with embroidered pillowcases, old oak furniture, carried into the new houses. Children played and laughed and shouted. And they were all Polynesian.

Semple Street was neat, lawns always mowed, no disembowelled cars on the grass verges, the houses small windowed 1930's state designs with boiling coppers in the wash houses and concrete washing tubs. They had terrazzo bench tops in the kitchens and tiled fireplace surrounds in the lounges.

The people had been so proud of their houses when they'd moved in, decades before. There was a newsreel existent showing the Prime Minister and Mr Semple helping with furniture.

It was still sometimes seen on television. They had been famous.

The New Zealand Welfare State had been good to them. They had eventually bought their houses. But the people had long since been forgotten. Their children had grown and left home.

The old people had much time to brood, to think. Once, they had queued at the post office for the old age pension, then the postman had come with their old age pension cheques from Social Welfare, now no postman came, they received their National Superannuation money by direct credit. Life was becoming so complicated!

From Semple Street came the scent of roasting mutton, from Pacific Way came the smell of boiling taro and fish and yams, but it wasn't really the fact that the people up Pacific Way were Polynesians which worried Semple Street, it was the fact that the milkman and his rubber-wheeled trolley did not go up the right of way, and when in the early winter evening the old people drifted' out of their houses with their milk bottles and tokens, no Polynesians came down the right of way. Didn't they like milk?

They didn't put out rubbish tins or bags. The postman never went up the right of way -- didn't they get mail from the Islands?

The way of life in that old disused area seemed to be very different to that in Semple Way. The houses were not ordinary state houses, not even the newer trendy houses with balconies and carports; they appeared to be thatched roof houses. Possibly they were not state houses?

When it was raining cold winter rain on Semple Street, gentle tropical rain fell on Pacific Way and its houses, and in some lights those houses did definitely seem to have thatched coconut leaf roofs.

The whole previously vacant area entered through Pacific way sometimes had the appearance of having tropical vegetation, the road appeared to be white coral, and there were crotons, flame trees, coconut palms, bananas, limes, and fruit bats, mynahs and pigeons -- birds not seen in Semple Street.

There was a stretch of sand, perhaps left by the builders, which seemed to be a beach with the lagoon beyond - was it a pool of water left by the plumbers, now filled with sparkling blue lagoon water on which the sun danced?

An almost visible wall of warmth surrounded the Pacific Way enclave; one could almost reach out and touch it.

In Semple Street there was talk of a Ku-Klux-Klan night, but there wasn't much enthusiasm for it because that would mean going out at night and interrupting television viewing, and didn't it mean cutting up bed sheets? Mrs Potter said she wasn't going to cut up her bedsheet for one night.

"They never speak to us," Mr Bourne said.

"Perhaps they are frightened of us," Mr Hopkirk postulated.

"Why should they be frightened of us?" Mr Potter asked. He looked around, at Mr Scott in his tattered jersey and army trousers, the women in their print dresses from Woolworths, Mrs Corrigan with the hat she always wore, Mrs Going never seen without an apron. Mr Potter wore his grey flannel trousers and his polished brown shoes, his brown knitted tie and warm woolly shirt. They were ordinary normal New Zealanders, eating ordinary toast and Weetbix for breakfast, once and sausages, potatoes and pumpkins, morning and afternoon tea and suppers, just the ordinary six square meals a day of the older New Zealander.

"No reason at all, we are just ordinary people, but it isn't right that such a group of strange people should be plonked down in our midst, adjoining all our backyards." This was an odd attitude for Mr Potter to take.

Mr Potter had served in the Pacific war against the Japanese. He had always said that one day he was going back. He had been in the Solomon Islands -- Guadalcanal, then Green Island, and New Caledonia, but he talked of going to one of the exotic Polynesian tourist resort islands, like Tahiti. It was his dream, but he had left it too late? He talked of hula girls, swaying, strumming ukuleles, coconut palms, a paradise. He had a stack of tourist brochures for various tours from various travel agencies which he got every year. Mr Potter said that the South Seas were a paradise on earth, maybe not Guadalcanal and Bougainville during the war with malaria and mosquitoes, heat and fighting, but it was different today. "One day," he said. "One day."

But his wife -said she wasn't going. However a man can dream, can't he, Mr Potter said, when his wife remonstrated with him and his talk of the South Seas. He had left it too late. And the rest of the street, well, they weren't going anywhere either, and they just smiled. Mr Potter had a ukulele which he'd taught himself to play, well; he could play 'My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean'. He had a collection of Hawaiian recordings, 78's, and he'd seen all the Dorothy Lamour films.
The people said the Pacific Islands had come to the street rather than old Potter going to the IsIands, and maybe he was the cause of it all.

"It is not something you have dreamed up?" Mr Hopkirk asked suspiciously?

"Am I a magician?"

"I guess not."

The old people of Semple Street were now certainly worried. Why hadn't there been any publicity about the enclave? The men talked over their fences as they weeded their vegetable gardens, the women as they hung out their washing on their creaking rusting rotary clothes lines.

The old people were afraid that maybe it was an illusion? In some circles they would be considered old and doddery, and maybe potty, and maybe they were seeing things, and they'd be carted away to the looney bin holus-bolus, or even more frightening, to old peoples' homes.

The government should do something. Didn't they pay their taxes? Well, no, they didn't really, but they had made the country what it was today, they had built the railways, the roads, unloaded the ships, processed the sheep and cattle in freezing works, driven the trams, delivered the bread with horses and carts. They had rights.

Mr Potter did go into the Housing Corporation offices one day when he was in the city to order a new hat, wide-brimmed that had to be specially made for him in far away Christchurch, he'd always worn wide-brimmed felt hats, difficult to buy these days, and the blonde girl with the foreign unpronounceable name sitting behind the blonde desk, assured him that if the Corporation had built houses they were definitely there, which was no assurance at all.

Mrs Potter did mention the Islanders to the woman who drove the mobile library which parked in Semple Street on Monday mornings, but she didn't seem to know what Mrs Potter was talking about and said that there had been no new building in this area for donkey's years.

The driver of the mobile library had been heard to say that the people in Semple Street were strange, old, old, old, and no sign of sickness. They were living for ever?

Semple Street was a strange street in its own right. They were remarkably healthy, there were no walking sticks, crutches, wheelchairs, the doctor never called, or the district nurse, meals on wheels never rolled. Sometimes, in the very minor illnesses that rarely afflicted the residents they thought of death, but the undertaker had never called into this street.

The old people had no history of family longevity, but there wasn't a person under 90 in the street, and still the grim reaper had not appeared. They discussed having birthday parties as they each turned 100.

Would they all go together? They'd all come to the street simultaneously. That was something they had joked about as the years had rolled on. Maybe it was something in the air? It was a windy area and maybe disease and death were blown away?

It was the mobile librarian, who had alerted the government years ago to the old people of Semple Street, 'and they had all been examined by a team from a university who confessed they were baffled. The Minister of Housing had said proudly that this was how his government looked after its old people, so they had almost eternal life.

It was thought that this winter could be the end of the old people. It was the wettest, coldest, frostiest winter in memory. The chimneys smoked as fires roared in an endeavour to keep the cold away, yet, over the fence, it was -- warm. An epidemic of flu was sweeping the country and especially the city. Many old people were inoculated with anti influenza vaccine to combat the strain, but not these old people of Semple Street. Coughing and spluttering postmen, rubbish men and milkmen, had no effect on these old people -- yet. They were immune. Weren't they?

The old people were apprehensive, and defensive, suspicious of anything that would evict them from their houses. If as this moving in of Islanders a plot to make them move to a Sunset Home. Would the Islanders have eyes on their houses for their innumerable relatives arriving in droves from the Islands?

"We will not move," Mr Pottered shouted at them over the fence. "Nothing will evict us from our homes, not even you.

"There was a priest who called on Mrs Ogilvie once a month. Young Father Benson was such a nice man. She would ask him. The church did have exorcisms -- didn't it? He'd know what to do. He was a Polynesian, a Samoan she thought, but in the eyes of God all men were equal no matter what the colour of their skin.

The priest came as usual at 10 a.m. on a Monday morning in his black suit and driving the old Morris Minor.

"Can I see this area behind?" he asked.

On the back lawn beside the tool shed he looked out, frowned, took off his spectacles and polished them, looked again. It was a cold winter's morning, there had been a hard frost, it still lingered, and there was no sun on Semple Street, but was the sun shining on Pacific Way?

Father Benson looked very thoughtful. "Very interesting," he said, almost evasively. He suddenly shivered, but it was cold.

"Another nice cup of tea is what we all want," Mrs Ogilvie said. They perched on chairs, stood around the walls. Some of the residents were shy in front of the priest, but Father Benson was a man who put everybody at ease.

"They are your sort of people, Father."

"All people are my sort of people," he said gently.

There was chocolate cake with chocolate icing, and fresh date scones, old-fashioned marble cake and Anzac biscuits and peanut brownies.

"Do you really want to make these people depart?" Father asked carefully.
"I mean, they are doing no harm."

"The smoke from their cooking fires is smelly," Mr Bourne grumbled.

"Where do they get the wood?"

"By chopping down coconut trees, one supposes."

"They dry fish in the sun."

"Perhaps you should make an approach," Father said. "Have you ever spoken to them?"

Well, no, they hadn't, because the Islanders had never spoken. Mr Potter wanted to talk to the Polynesians over the back fence, he had in fact called out, but he was ignored, which was strange. Couldn't they hear him?

"Maybe we should go up the right of way and join them," Mr Potter said wistfully. "It looks warm; it would mean we wouldn't have to go to Surfers, or Honolulu or Tahiti for a winter vacation." That was a laugh, none of them, except Mr Potter, had ever been out of New Zealand.

Father Benson certainly didn't have a solution and he left, looking troubled.

That night in Semple Street it snowed, for the first time in long living memory. Cold! It was freezing!

And in the early morning there had been no stirring/in any of the houses, no electric jugs had boiled for tea, there was no toast smell, but a Polynesian, a chief perhaps, came down the street knocking on all the front doors. He wore a tapa cloth toga, and he invited all to a feast up Pacific Way. It was strange that there were no marks in the snow from the chief's bare feet, but those Islanders could glide over the ground.

The residents of Semple Street responded, led by Mr Potter dressed in a bright hula shirt of red and green he had had in the back of his old oak wardrobe for years, khaki shorts and mouldy leather sandals, a floppy grey sunhat, and carrying his ukulele. The other men wore their best suits, the women their best dresses.

They entered Pacific Way and immediately the air was warm, they became a happy laughing group, giggling, almost childish, calling to each other. The men took off their ties, rolled up their trouser legs, put knotted handkerchiefs on their bald heads; the women took off their stockings and shoes.

They were welcomed by the smiling Islanders who spoke in their own language, but the people of Semple Street understood perfectly. They paddled in the lagoon. There were strumming ukuleles, and up amongst the coconut palms was a four-gallon kerosene tin of orange beer, and the men drifted back smacking their lips. The air was warm; the lagoon waters lapped the white sand. It was paradise.

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