Kiwis Might Fly

1 Rocking the Cradle "So," Sian, my neurologist friend, asked brightly, "are you going to wear one of those motorcycle helmets that covers the back of your head up to your fourth cervical vertebra, so that if you crash you're left quadriplegic, or are you going to get one of those higher-cut ones so that you're killed outright instead?" My stomach lurched. I was deeply afraid. It had all started a few months earlier, when I'd read a survey that claimed the ordinary Kiwi bloke was about to turn up the toes of his gum boots. He was, apparently, hanging up his sheep shears and moving to the city. A new masculinity was rearing its pretty, hair-gelled head. Men were waxing their backs. In ten years, said the survey, the traditional, hirsute New Zealand man would be dead. The early New Zealanders had been virile and vigorous. The Maori were fearless warriors. Then the Europeans had arrived after arduous journeys across thousands of miles of treacherous ocean. The life that awaited them was hard. New Zealand men grew up to be strong. They slaughtered whales, panned for gold, and felled timber. They learned to play rugby. Fearlessly, they drank home-brewed beer. Then something went wrong. The environment changed; the spe-cies had to mutate. Volcanic eruptions? Tectonic shifts? An overboiling of the primordial soup? No. It was none of these things. It had more to do with washing machines from Japan. With the arrival of airplanes and domestic appliances, the fences came unstuck for the traditional New Zealand man. What did it matter if he could mend a tractor using three bits of old wire and a pot of distilled sheep dung when spare parts were lined up at the local Kawasaki store? The real Kiwi bloke was fast becoming redundant. The curious thing was that nobody seemed to be making much of a fuss about his demise. When other creatures have faced extinctionwhen the tiger threatened to roar no more, or the red-legged frog looked fit to croakthe conservationists beat their chests like gorillas whose trees just got the chop. But when the Kiwi bloke, an almost-human species, began to shuffle off to the big brewery in the sky, nobody seemed much bothered. One or two insensitive souls even breathed a quiet sigh of relief. There was nothing else to do. Somebody was going to have to travel to the other side of the globe, to delve deep into the New Zealand countryside, to sniff around on sheep farms and poke about in rural pubs and ask the question: Is the Kiwi bloke really about to breathe his last? It was cold and raining at home in London; in New Zealand it was summer, the perfect time to hunt out a shy spe- cies on the verge of extinction from its spectacular alpine hideaways and wave-swept beachside lairs. It looked as though that somebody might have to be me. I thought I'd tour New Zealand on a motorcycle. Kiwi men were known to be fond of machinery; these were the guys who were meant to be able to strip down the engine of their truck on a Sunday afternoon and have it working again by Monday. If I rode a motorcycle, I thought, and, better still, if I shoehorned myself into the tightest set of black motorcycling leathers I could find, I should stand a greater chance of luring these timid men from their hunting grounds and watering holes. If I was really lucky, I might even persuade one or two of them to speak. I enrolled in motorcycling classes. Working on the basis that there are fewer maniacal cars out to kill a learner motorcyclist in the countryside than in town, I decided to take lessons in the depths of rural Derbyshire. I shared my first day's training with two sixteen-year-old boys who had just been given their first mopeds. We learned that cool kids ride safely. The two boys set off around the traffic cones on their gloriouslEvans, Polly is the author of 'Kiwis Might Fly ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780385339940 and ISBN 0385339941.