family ghosts, family writers

So there I am, in the Archives NZ reading room (which is doubling as the Alexander Turnbull Library reading room at the moment while they tart up the ATL and National Library) looking for the letter by Uncle Paul which is in the restricted Ngata files, and I saw a guy in a Taupo Swimming Club jacket waving at me. Funny, aye, where family shows up.

Pete isn't a blood relative but he's totally part of the whanau. He is the father of three of my cousins, and I see him a few times a year at different family events. We will often have a chat about something at these occasions - but he'd never mentioned that he hangs out at the ATL in his spare time when he's in Wellington. Thinking about it further, I'm guessing that he could say the same thing about me.

He was reading through the journals of a NZ sports writer who followed the ABs tour of South Africa which was the first to include Maori rugby players in the NZ team (oh, and one Samoan guy too). He's writing something about a layering of connections between ghosts buried side by side in South Africa, news which fascinated me both because the premise of his story is compelling and because I had once again underestimated the number and range of Maori writers in the family.

Pete also had a printout of his great-uncle's war records from his time in the Maori Battalion during WWII. As we talked about these uncles, and the possibilities of connection between them during the war (his uncle was killed within a few months of my uncle, and both are buried in Italy), I became aware again of the ways that talking about our ghosts - our relatives, our families, who we are - gives us opportunities to further connect to each other and the present. We reflected together on the essential waste of these young mens' futures - "do you ever just feel sad when you think about Uncle Paul?" Pete asked at one point - and were struck by the impossibility of imagining how things might have turned out if they'd come home.

I'll pop back to the ATL on Thursday to pick up the letter from Uncle Paul which I ordered today. I'd wondered if the letter would be waiting for me already behind the desk today, seeing as I'd acquired permissions to view and copy it, and had assumed I'd alreayd have read it by now. But that wasn't the order of things for this part of the process: instead of reading Uncle Paul's letter, I have heard about another fallen Battalion soldier who may well have known him and whose grave (whose ghost?) is closer to him than any of the rest of us. I have heard of another writer in the family. I like to think that Uncle Paul is pleased about this turn of events, this proliferation of relationships between him, his letter and myself. This extension of writing and ideas. This family. These ghosts.