24. Lighting a fag in Tanuki’s Cave by James Curtis

One of David’s favourite places in Auckland was Tanuki’s Cave, a Japanese yakatori grill and sake bar in Queen St. He’d been there a few times with Dad and Michele, when he was visiting from Linton.

When I came home from London for Christmas in December 2004, that is where David and I, Dad and Michele, and Richard and Kuljit went to celebrate. We had a really good time. David loved all the different meat dishes cooked right in front of you, and the beer and the warm sake of course. David offered to pay for the whole meal that night and gave Dad $150. Dad took it but gave it back to him later.

When Dad, Michele and Kuljit left, the three of us stayed on and we were the last in the restaurant. David had a game he liked to play where he would head butt us. It was something he learnt in the army and he thought it was quite funny. This was also the first night of the smoking ban in New Zealand, which was a real challenge for someone like David. He rolled up a fag, lit it and started smoking in the restaurant. The bar staff noticed this very quickly and told him he couldn’t do that, so David had a few puffs and stubbed out his cigarette. David didn’t like people telling him what to do and he enjoyed pushing the limits, but he didn’t go too far that night.

It was a really nice family evening. I liked Tanuki’s Cave because David liked it and I’ve been back several times since.

23. Hanging out at Muritai School by James Curtis

Skateboarding at Muritai School brought us all together. It gave us all somewhere to go after high school. Most people brought their skateboards to skate on the ramps that the youth worker Chris Casey had helped the boys build. Even kids who lived in the Hutt would come out to skate on those ramps. They were really popular.
 
We formed a bit of a community really. There was Dave and me, Tom Owers, Tom Rainey-Smith, Shamus and Sam Boyer, Harley Tripey, Matt Tuffin, Reuben Nicholas and Tom Lynch. Sometimes the older brothers Sam Rainey-Smith and Stephen Owers would join us. We felt like the rebels, listening to punk music in our cars and skating. You could have up to 40 kids down there, just mucking around and hanging out together. 
 

I just tagged along really, but I had my car and sometimes my motorbike and that made me popular. We liked playing the US band NOFX on our car stereos. It’s skate punk type music -- ante-establishment, anarchistic and ante-capitalism. They were one of our favourite bands. 

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Sometimes we would go to Ryan Cowley’s place and sit in the garage smoking and drinking beer. One night, some of Ryan’s friends were staying over. Dave, Tom and I thought it would be funny to light fireworks in the driveway at night time and the run off. But unfortunately, Ryan’s father heard us and got into his car and chased after us. Eventually he found us in Muritai School and really lost his cool. I am not sure he handled it very well. But I guess we could be pretty annoying too.
 
The principal of Muritai School, Pete Pointon, let the skateboarding go for a while, but he had trouble with Dave and Tom and eventually banned the skaters. Then the skating ramps moved over to San Antonio. Things changed a bit after that.

22. Holidays at El Rancho by James Curtis

Sometimes during the school holidays, Mum would send me and Dave to El Rancho Christian holiday camp in Waikanae. We enjoyed the activities on offer, including a “flying carpet”, which gave you a ride around a field on a rug pulled along by a tractor. There was a mud slide, air rifles, horse riding, a flying fox and a sweet shop. There really was a lot to do at these camps.
 

We were not so keen on the Bible bashing sessions, however. They tried to scare us, saying that if we and our parents did not become Christians, we would go to hell. We didn’t believe what they were saying and would take the piss a bit. In fact, we tried to push it as far as we could go, which probably annoyed them a lot. However, we did think it was cool when our cabin leader asked the Holy Spirit to come into each of us. We all felt something quite special that night.

Overall, going to those camps was a good experience. At least we began thinking about things. One of the youth leaders took a particular interest in Dave and Tom and came to visit us in Eastbourne a few times. He was rather intense, I think.

21. The 402 Muritai Road weapons programme by James Curtis

It was Dave and me against the world.

Our weapons programme began quite simply, making bows and arrows out of all the bamboo growing on our property. Later we got a bit more sophisticated and started putting fins on the back of the arrows. Then we discovered we could tape nails on the front and would aim them at targets down the back of the section.
 

The plums were a great temptation, of course, and were great ammunition for the various sling shots we made or were given. Uncle Colin gave us some primo sling shots once, which Mum wasn’t at all happy about. She had to confiscate them in the end, especially when she found out we sometimes fired them at birds.
 

Joey guns were great for shooting gum nuts. We made these out of bits of pipe and fingers from old rubber gloves taped onto the ends with masking tape. You could get different gloves that would shoot the nuts at greater or shorter distances. Dave and I would play a “war” game with Stephen, Chris and Matthew Galbreath next door and Patrick Rountree up the road, using all three properties. We would be in teams and then hide from each other. You could take prisoners of war and put them in captivity. We used pretend guns sometimes. The tree forts we made were part of the war game. Some of the trees on our property ended up with so many nails hammered into them, they were virtually destroyed. We liked to help out the Galbreath boys on their fort design and construction too. We also played a lot of “war”games with the Baker brothers. They even attacked our house one day.

Attacking the judge’s house next door was great fun when we got home from school. We really wanted to flatten his house, for some reason. We would throw eggs, tomatoes, rotten fruit, old 78 records belonging to my Dad, anything we could think of really, at his house and at his nice white chimney. We also fired BB guns over the fence. 

He would get so angry with us and would come over to see Mum to try and find out why we kept doing it and what she could do to stop it. Really, there was nothing much she could do – we were just so determined to annoy everyone. Funnily enough, the judge and I made up in the end and he even let me keep my motorbike in his garage, which was better than storing it by the shed at home.

Dave and I eventually moved onto bomb making, using things like baking soda and vinegar and putting it in a canister. There were lots of other missiles we made too.
 

Around Guy Fawkes, we would use fireworks in our war games. Eventually the community picked up on our fireworks wars and we would have a big war down at Bishops Park, which Dave and I led. We were the Curtis brothers, our own entity, and this was illustrated best through the feuds we had with other families. It was total mayhem. Roman candles, which came in 20-shots, was a favourite weapon, as was Thunder in the Blue Sky, which made an extremely loud bang. We would fire this above people’s heads to frighten them. Unfortunately, this firework was banned after the first year. We made skyrocket launchers, a pipe in which we could fire off our skyrockets horizontally at people. Mostly we shot the little fireworks at people.
 

The morning after Guy Fawkes, Dave and I would get up at dawn and head out on our bikes to collect unlit or dud fire works from the parks and beaches. We would bring them back in New World plastic bags and hide them under our beds. Then we would spend the next few weeks emptying out the gunpowder and recycling it as bomb-making material.
 

One morning, after Mum had gone to work, we let off a big fireworks bomb in the back garden. Jill next door rang the local policeman Jo Mitchell to tell him a weapon had been fired next door. He was around in five minutes, but he didn’t do anything. He was just a push over, really.
 

Dave and I just loved our weapons programme. I would say our passion and enthusiasm for it were equally matched.

20. Camping at Butterfly Creek by James Curtis

One Saturday, David, Tom Owers and I decided to go camping for a night at Butterfly Creek. David and Tom would have been at primary school still and I had probably started at Petone College.
 

Tom’s father Bill decided to walk over the hill with us, as he liked walking anyway. We had a three-person tent and backpacks laden with beer and some food. Unfortunately, the beer started to leak and we worried Bill would notice and might take it from us. Anyway, fortunately he didn’t notice and he left us in the late afternoon to set up camp.

We pitched the tent, made a campfire, ate the baked beans and drank all the beer. It was a great place to go camping, so close to home but you really felt away from it all in the bush as the darkness fell. I also remember going camping over there when I was at Muritai School.

19. Go kart racing thrills by James Curtis

Go kart racing down Kowhai Street was a really dangerous activity but Dave and I loved it. We had a great little trolley that we bought from a garage sale – just a wooden box, really, with four wheels and a steering wheel. Richard Sarginson, who lived in Mahoe Street, had one too.
 
Often we would take our trolley to Greenwood Park where we would roll down the bank in it, but taking it up to the top of Kowhai Street and rolling down from the top to the bottom at high speed was really challenging and dangerous. It was a miracle no one got hurt or killed, really.

Dave and I also loved riding our BMX bikes around the neighbourhood and in Greenwood Park. We also played a lot of ball tag with Chris and Stephen Galbreath, who were our neighbours, and with Patrick Rountree, who lived two doors away on the other side. We would play this game, using a tennis ball, in the three properties and down at Greenwood Park.