Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey. Brian Sibley

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       My dad is the first child on the left, with two of his four brothers. Both my parents came from five-child households, yet I was an only child. My dad loved Charlie Chaplin movies and encouraged my love of silent comedy. He always said his father looked like Chaplin and would get people yelling ‘Hi Charlie’ at him. I can see why in this photo from the early Twenties. My granddad died at a comparably young age in 1940 – my dad always said it was due to his war injuries.

      William Jackson had been born in 1920 in Brixton, South London; Joan Ruck, his wife to be, was also born in 1920 near the Hertfordshire village of Shenley; both of them were drawn to New Zealand – as were many others in the years immediately following the Second World War – in response to a tantalizing scheme in which the New Zealand Government offered free or assisted passage to single men and women, under the age of 36, looking to make a fresh start.

      ‘Emigrate to New Zealand for a NEW way of life,’ read a typical advertisement in a London newspaper of 1949. ‘Good Jobs…Good Pay…Good Living…New Zealand has a place for YOU in her future development.’

      When Bill Jackson set sail on the Atlantis in 1950, his motivation for leaving home and family was less to do with good jobs and good pay as with his affection for a girl who wanted to emigrate from Britain. Bill, who had been working with a division of the travel agency, Thomas Cook, organised the girl’s passage and decided to go along too. The romance ended before ever the ship docked in Wellington, but Bill never regretted his journey to the other side of the world.

      Bill became a government employee working for the post office – the deal on assisted passages required the émigré to sign a two-year work contract – found accommodation in Johnsonville, a few miles out of Wellington, and joined the Johnsonville Football Club, into which he later enlisted two other British lads who had recently arrived in New Zealand: Frank and Bob Ruck.

      In 1951, the Ruck brothers’ sister, Joan, came to Wellington,

       The only hint of any film or theatrics in my family’s background came through my mother, who was a member of the local amateur dramatics club in her home village of Shenley in Hertfordshire, England. Here’s Mum in some melodrama from what looks like the late 1940s.

      together with their mother, for what was originally intended to be a six-month visit. After years of war-time rationing and post-war privations, the ‘good living’ promised in those immigration advertisements ensured that an eventual return to Shenley soon ceased to be an option for the future.

      Joan got a job at a hosiery factory in the city and whilst attending Saturday matches at the Johnsonville Football Club where her brothers played, met and struck up an acquaintanceship with one of their British mates – Bill Jackson.

      Bill and Joan’s friendship blossomed and two years later, in November 1953, they were married and moved to Pukerua Bay, purchasing a small holiday home. The single-storey, two-bedroom house was small, but had a wide uninterrupted view overlooking the ocean and the rugged splendour of the Kapiti coastline.

      Taking its name from the Maori word for ‘hill’, Pukerua was founded on the site of a Maori community. Along the side of the hills, which drop sharply to the sea, snakes the precarious track of the Paraparaumu railway line out of Wellington. The area is virtually as unspoilt today as it was fifty years ago, with its wooded and heather-covered slopes; its equitable climate, facing north and protected from the cold south winds by the hills of the Taraura Ranges; and its glorious sunsets that, in the late afternoon, turn sea and sand to gold.

       Mum and Dad both emigrated to New Zealand separately and met in Johnsonville.

      The year after their marriage, Bill Jackson got a job as a wages clerk with Wellington City Council. Loyal, dedicated and hardworking, he remained an employee of the Council until his retirement, by which time he had risen to the position of paymaster.

       After years of my parents trying to have a baby, I finally turned up in 1961. For whatever reason, Mum and Dad couldn’t produce a brother or sister for me.

      Born in 1961, Peter was a late child of Joan and Bill’s marriage, and complications during the confinement meant that he was destined to be an only child.

      Being an only child and not having anyone else to bounce ideas off, you have to create your own games with whatever props come to hand. You find that you create your fun and entertainment in your own head, which helps to exercise the mind and trains you to be more imaginative…

      As an only child – as well as being long-awaited and, therefore, much treasured – Peter was also the sole focus of his parents’ love, care, attention and encouragement. Without sibling companionship or competitiveness, Peter instinctively related to an older generation and, in particular, one that mostly comprised veterans of the 1939–45 war. Peter’s youthful imagination was excited by the overheard reminiscences of his elders and the stories that they told a youngster eager for tales of dangers and heroisms.

      The Second World War was the dominant part of their most recent lives. Mum would tell me lots of stories about her life: the air-raids and doodlebugs and her experiences working as a foreman in a De Havilland aircraft factory where they built the Mosquito bomber which was largely made out of wood and was known as the ‘Timber Terror’.

      My father didn’t talk as much about his wartime experiences, as I

      I grew up with Grandma Emma as the matriarch of the family. She taught me to love card games and was a wonderful cook. In her younger years, she was a cook for an upper-class family in London. Upstairs, Downstairs was her favourite show – it was the world she came from. Here she is holding me as a baby. She lived to be 98 and died just as I was making Bad Taste.

      would now have liked…He had served with the Royal Ordnance Corps in Italy and, before that, on the island of Malta. This was during the grim years of 1940–43 when German and Italian forces lay siege to the British colony that was of such crucial importance to the war in the Mediterranean and which, as a result, suffered terrible hardships.

      Dad spoke about some of what he had seen, but he never really dwelt on the bad things; although he did talk about his time on Malta when, due to enemy blockades and the СКАЧАТЬ