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The Year I turned Thirteen and Broadened My Mind

  By Lynne Roberts

  Copyright 2014 Lynne Roberts

  ISBN 978-1-927241-07-3

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  Contents

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 1.

  I’ll never forget the year I turned thirteen – that was the year we got foreigners. My friend Kevin says I make it sound like it was some sort of disease. Well it wasn’t a disease really, more like a curse.

  It started innocently enough. My older sister Amber was complaining as we ate our dinner. That is nothing unusual. Amber is always complaining. She reckons Mum and Dad should let her stay up later at night or go out with friends and not have to be back at reasonable times. She says that if she complains long enough they give way in the end. Not a lot, usually, but a bit anyway. Amber says I should be grateful to her as she is the one who does all the hard work complaining so that when I want to do something its, “oh that’s fine, Robbie.”

  Amber says I get to stay up later than she did when she was my age but I just say that is because I’m a boy and it’s well known that boys can stay up later than girls. About this point she usually hits me and I have to be very cunning to get in a quick hit back before I get told off for hitting a girl. Honestly! When she started it!

  So Amber was complaining away and this time it was about travelling. Her friend Julia was going to Fiji for the holidays with her parents and Amber wanted to know why we couldn’t go to Fiji as well.

  My father said “We can’t afford it.”

  Amber suggested he could borrow the money and pay it back later. This didn’t go down too well because Amber always runs out of pocket money and asks for an advance. She’s never in living memory been able to pay any of it back and I think she’s in debt for the next seven years anyway.

  Dad raved on about how terrible an example that would be and why he had the misfortune to have children with no sense of economy, heaven alone knew. I thought that was a bit unfair because I don’t get into debt as much as Amber does. My problem is that she borrows from me and faithfully promises to pay me back then never does. Or she says she’ll do something for me instead – like let me listen to her CD collection, only she’s always hogging the stereo herself so it never happens. She even offered to do my homework for me once when I complained about having no spending money, but she did it in her writing which is so much neater than mine it was obvious I hadn’t done it. So I ended up with a detention and still no money.

  Amber said that the benefits of travel were well known as they broadened the mind.

  I asked what broadening the mind meant. Dad sort of coughed and said it should be obvious which meant that he had no idea either.

  Mum said, “It means that you expand your horizons.”

  Dad and I both looked blank at this so she went on to tell us that by understanding and learning more about the way other people live we enjoy our own lives more.

  I said, “I’ve see documentaries of starving Africans but it doesn’t make me enjoy my meals more. Sometimes it makes me feel guilty about all the stuff we have when they are dying.”

  Mum said that wasn’t quite what she meant and Amber said that was exactly the problem.

  “Robbie wouldn’t be so ignorant if we did more travelling, especially if we went overseas.”

  She could see Mum start to look guilty about this so she redoubled her efforts.

  “It would make things much easier for school, as well. Look at when I had to do a project on a foreign country. It was hard because I hadn’t been there. Think how much easier it would have been if we’d done some travelling around the world.”

  We all remembered that project. Amber’s class was told to do a project on a country of their choice. So Amber chose Finland. I don’t know why she chose it and she didn’t seem to know either, unless it was to be different. Most other kids did Japan or Australia. Our lives were made miserable for a whole month while Amber tried to do her project. The main trouble was there was almost no information on Finland anywhere we could find and it sounded a totally boring country. The class was supposed to cook and share a ‘national dish’, and that bit wasn’t too bad. Mum dug out an old recipe book that had a recipe for Omenapiirakka or apple cake. It was a bit like a custardy apple shortcake but it couldn’t compete with the garlic snails or raw fish that other kids took along. Amber wanted everyone to experience the Finnish way of life by having a sauna and suggested that we all go into the bathroom and shut the doors and windows and turn the shower on full hot to make steam.

  Mum and Dad got very narky about this and refused to go along with it. They were even narkier when a note came home from Amber’s teacher complaining about her artwork. They had to do something like a mural about their chosen country and Amber plastered glue over a whole sheet of paper then crumbled blocks of polystyrene packing foam over it to make snow. Unfortunately the polystyrene floated all around the room and even stuck to the ceiling and the caretaker made a huge fuss. The headmaster fussed just as much when Amber made raspberry cordial and took it to school in bottles and told the other kids it was red wine from Finland.

  Amber blamed the teacher for giving them the project and blamed Mum and Dad for not taking her to Finland to see what it was really like.

  So there she was grumbling about travel for about the sixteenth day in a row when Dad made the announcement that was to change all our lives.

  “I agree with you, Amber,” he said firmly. “Travel does broaden the mind.” We gaped at him and Amber started to look hopeful

  “However, we do not need to travel ourselves to see the world. I have decided that what we will do is to have people from other countries come to live with us for a short while so that we can enrich our lives by hearing about their cultures.”

  Amber and I looked stunned. Dad doesn’t usually talk like this. He’s a truck driver and is usually pretty down to earth.

  “Look!” He waved a booklet at us and I realised that he had been quoting it.

  “This is the Farm Assistance Youth Scheme,” Dad continued.

  “All we have to do is provide a room and food and people from other countries will come to live with us and work every day on our farm.”

  “We don’t have a farm,” protested Amber.

  “We have a farmlet, it’s the same thing,” said Dad confidently.

  Yeah right, farmlet. Actually it’s only a bigger than usual section with a glasshouse on it. Mum grows flowers for market in the glasshouse and she is always grizzling that it’s too much work for her and that we don’t help enough. But it’s so boring. We’ve all spent hours pricking out plants, weeding, cutting stems and stapling boxes, but Amber and I seize every opportunity to wriggle out of helping.

  “It will be such a help for me,” Mum beamed. “Your father and I talked it over and decided that it wouldn’t cost much more to feed an extra person or two and the experience would really benefit you children.”

  “Where are they going to sleep?” demanded Amber.” We only have three bedrooms and I’m not sharing a room with Ro
bbie.”

  We both looked appalled at the thought.

  “We already thought of a solution,” Dad answered. ‘We’re going to close in the little veranda at the end of the house. It only needs a couple of windows and a door and it will make a perfect room for Robbie.”

  “What?” I nearly fell off my chair. “What do you mean, room for me? I‘ve already got a perfectly good bedroom.”

  “We need your bedroom for the farm helpers,” Mum explained patiently. ”It has two beds so it will be ideal. You can go into the new veranda room as it is only a single.”

  Single was right. That veranda is so small it would be perfect if you were a dwarf. Preferably one who had a solid background in tightrope walking as the floor was so old and uneven.

  “I have a couple of days off at the end of this week so we’ll make a start then,” said Dad briskly.

  By the time I came home from school on Friday, Dad and one of his mates had already put in two large windows and a door that they bought from the local demolition yard.

  “We also picked up a wardrobe for you,” said Dad cheerfully, proudly pointed to an enormous cupboard that took up all the space along one wall.

  “It’s far too big,” I protested. “There is no room for anything else.”

  Dad looked guilty for a minute and said rather defensively that he’d been given it for nothing.

  “Probably because no one else was stupid enough to take it,” said Amber darkly.

  “Well I can’t take it out now. I’ve put in all the windows and the door so it’s there to stay.”

  Even Kevin looked stunned by the size of the room. He had come back with me after school to inspect my new bedroom as he had said that it couldn’t be as bad as I was making out. After standing in silence for a minute or two he agreed that it was. Bad, I mean.

  “But look on the bright side. You’ve got your own door to the outside.”

  “Yes, but that’s about all there is. A cupboard and a door. I suppose a bed will go in but where will I put my furniture?”

  “Your furniture is staying in your bedroom,” said Mum nervously as she saw my expression. “We picked up a second hand divan with drawers underneath, so you don’t need a dressing table, and your father is going to screw a piece of wood on the end of the cupboard so it flaps down for a desk. What colour would you like us to paint the walls?”

  I suggested black or bright red which naturally they ignored and made it a sort of dirty cream colour. Dad did screw up a huge piece of notice board stuff so I could put posters on the cupboard door. There was a bit of trouble when Mum made me take the stickers off the cupboard door in my old room. She discovered the large hole that I had made when trying a new cricket swing and that I had successfully concealed under a superman sticker. Mum was looking very grim when Dad said he could screw a mirror over it so no one would ever know. By the time he did this Mum was having such fun sewing patchwork quilts for the beds that she agreed it looked good with hardly a murmur. Dad was a bit grizzly when we had to eat lunch outside because the sewing machine was set up on the table but that was only because he had nowhere to prop up his newspaper.

  Kevin came round again on Sunday and helped me move all my stuff through to the new room. By the time we had put all my model plane collection on top of the cupboard and stacked the rest of the stuff on some of the shelves it didn’t look too bad. It smelled a bit painty still when I went to bed but Mum had splashed out on a new red duvet and curtains for me with black and yellow racing cars on them, so it could have been worse. Mum and Dad had even bought a piece of yellowy brown carpet for the floor so the crooked floor wasn’t so noticeable.

  Our first farm helpers were coming on Tuesday and Mum was going to pick them up from the bus while we were at school. She gave us so many instructions about behaving at mealtimes and being polite to each other and showing what a typical New Zealand family was like that Amber and I were fed up to the back teeth with it all.

  “If they want to see a typical New Zealand family then we should be able to be rude to each other,” argued Amber.

  “No one in a family goes round being polite to each other all the time.”

  “I expect you to behave,” said Dad sternly. “We must make a good impression.”

  “These two girls are from a convent in Argentina,” Mum added. “This is their first time away from their country and they will probably be very shy and homesick. I expect you to be very nice to them.”

  “Do they speak English?” I asked.

  “Not much, mainly Spanish. Mrs Hodder who runs the Farm Assistance Scheme said that they can understand if we speak slowly and simply.”

  I didn’t know about Amber, but I was starting to get quite interested despite myself. It would be great to have Mum off my back. Instead of nagging me to help in the glasshouse she’d have these two Spanish girls and they could take their turn at washing the dishes as well.

  Mum had excitedly planned to have a typical New Zealand meal with roast lamb and veg followed by pavlova with kiwifruit sliced onto it.

  “Aren’t you giving the wrong impression here?” Amber asked. “I mean if you have a great meal on their first night they’ll expect something like that every night and you know we hardly ever have pudding.”

  Mum looked a bit worried by this but said she would have to see how things went which Amber and I hoped would mean pudding every night for the ten days the girls were here.