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MIDWINTER IN LYTTELTON. At eleven in the morning a wafer of sun squints over a saddle in the Port Hills to dazzle my living-room and remind me that Christchurch on the other side of the hills is basking. By noon that sun has gone. For the next
23 hours this house will go sunless. I don’t mind.

Looking the other way from my frosted garden I can see the hills across the water bathed buttercup yellow with sunshine. The water between us is a sunny mirror. But on the steep and twisty road to my house, black ice survives from one snap-frozen night to the next. I don’t mind.

Early this morning I climbed the hills with my pup. Frost crunched under my boots, thin ice between rocks crackled and sounds carried for miles. My pup ran in delirious circles as most dogs do in frost or snow. He loved it. So did I.

I’ve lived here for 20 years now,  longer than I lived in my childhood home. I’m not sure why. Habit as much as anything, I suppose. I met middle-age here and my feet lost their itch. I don’t pretend Lyttelton is the best place on earth. It’s a port. Ships come from all over. At nine in the evening you’ll find the sailors on London Street shouting into the pay phones in Indonesian or Tagalog or Russian. Or seated outside the Empire with dripping ice creams or ensconced in the Lava Bar with a skinful. I like that.

I liked it more when you could wander on to the wharf to get close to the rusting ships and smell their salt-stained metallic tang. The timbers of the wharf were runnelled and gapped with age. Mooring ropes had wooden stops on them to keep rats from shimmying aboard. Some of the stops were painted with fierce cat faces, more for amusement, I suspect, than for rat-scaring.

You could fish from the stone jetty on Cashin Quay and catch red cod around the sewage outlet. But you can’t go down to the wharf any more. Chain link and razor wire have divided Lyttelton from the reason for its existence, partly because of the catch-all excuse of safety and partly because of a western funk over terrorism. It feels
like a divorce.

Time was when every second man here worked on the wharf. But containers, giant machinery and the imperative of profit have pared the workforce and most of those who still have jobs now live in Heathcote or town and drive the long tunnel each day. That tunnel is still Lyttelton’s lifeline. Yesterday smoke billowed from the extractor hoods above the entrance and they closed the tunnel. Within minutes the traffic had backed up the length of Norwich Quay and halfway to Corsair Bay. The only other route out is over tortuous Evans Pass to Sumner. A few years ago an escaped criminal was spotted here. They just closed two roads and he was trapped.

When I moved in, Lyttelton was cheap. Now the tumbledown cottage I bought for $40,000 in 1988 is worth $300,000, despite having lost half its long and skinny garden. On the subdivided bit they built a mock-Mediterranean villa in blaring white and the present owner of my old cottage can no longer scamper up his garden, hurdle the sagging fence and step into the old Presbyterian graveyard with its stone-etched record of drownings and infant deaths. Sheep used to graze there. If a sheep died the owner just shifted a broken stone and dumped the carcass into a grave.

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