In writing this article, I am facing a past that I have spent the last five years trying to escape. I am finally admitting a shameful secret, an experience so terrifying that small children shudder in terror. Or laughter. (I’ve found that, in this case, there’s a fine line between the two.)
My initial response, when asked to write of my hometown, was to refuse. When I first moved into a Vic hall of residence, I was ridiculed about my origins. I was mocked by a girl from Waipukurau. A guy from Wainuiomata literally pointed at me and cackled. The people on my floor thought they would display their superior wit by pinning the name of my hometown to my bedroom door, to ensure that any mere passers-by could participate in the humiliation. It would be an understatement to say that I was in no rush to re-embrace my past.
However, after pondering the request a little longer, I decided that it was time to come clean. Surrounded by others who were revealing their origins, in an issue dedicated to small towns, I felt that I was in a safe environment. It could be cathartic, I told myself. It could prove invigorating. *Deep breath*
My name is Franchesca and I come from Feilding.
Feilding has a bad reputation. Not in the ‘you-will-probably-get-beaten-up-by-12-year-olds-in-the-square’ way like Palmerston North, but more in the ‘you-will-probably-die-of-boredom-before-you-reach-12’ kind of way. For some reason, a community that labels itself ‘Friendly Feilding’, and has won the title of New Zealand’s Most Beautiful Town umpteen times, doesn’t garner too many cool points nationwide.
During my teenage years, this was exacerbated by the fact that the Holy Trinity of Feilding consisted of Rugby, Farming and God—generally in that order. When I attended FAHS—Feilding High School, the 1st XV rugby team were at their peak. The Whitelocks—a local rugby-playing family dynasty, three of whom now play for the Crusaders—were attending the school and, as a result, the team dominated almost any opposition they faced. Assemblies became little more than a bi-weekly wank-fest, where the principal proudly recited who made what representative team, who scored what try and who kicked what conversion. For many Feilding residents, a ‘cultural experience’ involved putting on the school colours, slipping on some gumboots and attending a rugby game. When the team met their arch-nemesis, Palmerston North Boys High School, 5000 people attended the match. Unlike the Crusaders, the 1st XV never had to drop their ticket prices to entice people to their game.
Feilding is a farming community. You can tell, because each Friday an unpleasant smell permeates the town as stock is transported in for the weekly sale. My farmer grandfather once told me that it was the smell of money. It put me off ever wanting to become a millionaire. When I first started high school, it was named Feilding Agricultural High School in honour of the school’s two working farms. While we didn’t have the numbers to sustain a Classics course, enough students were interested in the reproductive system of the school pigs to justify numerous Agriculture classes. For those of us who chose to take the bedrocks of Western education such as History, English, French and Geography, we were assured that our working farms were to our benefit as well. They gave us an edge over other schools, we were told. It showed the school’s diversity in the cut-throat world of secondary education. However, such justifications didn’t really help as we were being accused of bestiality at every inter-school sports exchange we ever attended.
For the 18 years that I lived in Feilding, it was generally accepted that if you were a true member of the community, you went to church. Despite the large question mark that I had hanging over my religious beliefs (aided, no doubt, by the fact that my mother had scorned institutionalised religion during my childhood in favour of the Spiritualist Church, where my siblings and I received new ‘spirit names’), the lack of local entertainment also drove me to God. Until my friends realised that if they kept inviting me, I would continue to argue with their pastors over the divinity of Jesus, my Friday nights were spent at various youth groups. Religion is so central to Feilding residents, that in a recent visit to the town I counted four churches in a one-kilometre stretch of road.
Yet, given the confessional nature of this article, I must admit that I loved growing up in Feilding. My childhood was literally a cheesy American family movie. Days were spent biking along tree-lined streets with the kids from next door, making forts and terrorising our younger sisters. We walked to school, spent the summer swimming in the river and played mini-golf at the Rotary-owned golf course. Feilding was a town where you could leave the door unlocked when you popped down to the supermarket. It was safe and, apart from the dairy owner who used to yell at us for taking too long to choose our one-cent lollies, everyone was cheerful. Despite the Holy Trinity, it can’t have been all bad. What I am today is a product of Feilding; and I think I turned out all right.