When I heard that friend Grant was ill I started to write out some notes about him. I had done something similar after David passed away. I figured I would get something down before Grant passed but I was too slow and I had barely got this underway when the news came through that he had gone. So I took my notes and turned them into a eulogy. It was not quite where I wanted to take my reflections, since I wanted this to be something Grant would read and which would let him know what an impact he had when I was a young lad. However I had a chance to spend a weekend with him just a couple of weeks before he died and we had those conversations face to face. It was a blessed weekend and a highlight in a lifetime of highlights.
My memories of Grant go straight to his grandfather first, for some reason. Spike lived in a well kept little crib tucked into a bend of the road to between Palmerston and Dunback and hemmed on the other side by a deep pool of dark water under the willows, created by the owners of a the Glenpark Flour mill further down the Shag River. One of the first flour mills in Otago. That pool was home to some of Dad’s eel traps which is possibly why I recall Spike so well. We would cross his lawn to get to the water to lay and retrieve traps. Winter floods one year took all of Dad’s traps out to sea (he had a few dotted along the length of the river), thus ending yet another passion. I think mum was relieved that no more smoked eels were on the menu. Grandfather ‘Spike’ liked a good box of matches. When a gorse fire he lit got away on the property at Waihola he and Dad simply noted it would eventually burn out on the Forestry land next door. Somehow matches and gunpowder featured a lot in our memories of those early days. Splitting logs on Grant’s place one afternoon turned into a plantation fire, a fiasco which the whole neighbourhood knew about. Dad had borrowed a black powder log splitter from Jack Paton but according to Grant had not asked how to use it. That doesn’t surprise me. They were using it to blow stumps apart but Dad loaded too much powder and not only lifted the stump but ignited the dry timber and needles around it. The fire got into the line of trees before they knew it. We very excitedly asked Dad at dinner time if he had seen the fire engine earlier in the day – it had gone past us with its sirens blaring, a highlight in the day of any kid. It didn’t take long for us to learn Dad had indeed seen the fire engine. He just didn’t want to talk about it over dinner. Every time we drove up the highway a scorched line of timber reminded Dad and the rest of the district of his gun powder lessons.
Above Spike’s place was Glenpark or ‘the Big Farm’ as Grant used to call the family property. Lots of Sunday lunches there, and other meals too. But more memorable were the foot on the fence (or bumper) conversations between my father and Grant’s dad, also Grahame. Grant’s father was typical of the generous community who would have Dad butcher a couple of sheep, one being payment for the labour. But more telling I think was the fact that Grant’s father volunteered to Dad his time in North Africa and the Middle East during World War Two. It wasn’t something these men really spoke about but out in the driveway of the house it was lightly touched on. Glenpark was a soldier settlement property like many of them were. His father had a brother in the armed services too. I know nothing about him. But in truth it was quite something that we knew anything at all about service in North Africa. No one spoke about their service. I only discovered after he was long buried that local Doctor Clapham was a recipient of the Military Cross. Read his extraordinary citation here.
But that we were in and out of their house was something normal for that community and they were in and out of ours as well. Grant especially. That we became some sort of second home is telling in many ways. Lines between families were blurred. But well defined too. Tight. We felt close. People said little but shared much, including of themselves. So when Grant’s younger brother Rodney was killed in an industrial accident at the Dunback limestone quarry we all felt it. Hard. Deep. I was young but old enough to feel the town stop. It was probably the first instance of me understanding the shock associated with sudden death. I recall clearly the sensation of everything shifting to slow motion. I had not felt the same with sister Joanna’s death a little earlier – oddly enough that came years later when I was recounting her story to someone else.
Grant went to school in Palmerston and then came back to work on the family farm as many young men did. Dad Grahame, with a pronounced limp (did he bring that back from Africa or had a cow kicked him?) farmed sheep and cattle and was an innovator with Aryshires which had come out from Scotland when Dunedin was first settled. Horses too. I have a vague recollection that the White family were some of the last to use horses to muster their sheep and cattle. Grant was certainly keen on riding. Mother Joyce was a vibrant and hospitable woman, and being in and out of each others homes was in no small part due to her. We knew her kitchen well. She knew ours too. When Joanna passed away I have a recollection of her being in the kitchen, half hidden behind a mountain of food stacked on the kitchen table. Those farmer’s wives knew what was needed when there was a sudden death in the house.
Grant was one of a dozen or so young adults in Palmerston Otago who crowded into the house each Sunday evening. We would call it a youth group today but then it was known as Bible Class. An equal mix of men and women but striking over the last forty years or so to me was the team of young men who inexplicably became Christians and were open and bold about their faith. David and his brothers. Neighbour Butch Thurlow. Philip Manly (a little younger). Alastair. Riley. Grant. In and out of our house. Full of laughter. Practical. Famers for the most part. Active in the community. Leading the youth camps. Energetically working on the youth camp site at Waihola. For myself and my brothers these much older men were a source of inspiration. Role models. Much to their surprise of course as we had the chance to explore who they meant to us years later. Grant and his colleagues were usually non demonstrative but led by example. By the time we were in our teens they were firm friends. Grant was especially close.
I have especially fond memories of him from our Stewart Island trip in 1976. The photo here is of him at Masons Bay. He was always armed with a camera but we have never seen those Stewart Island 1976 images. He assured me a few weeks ago that they were in his collection but they have yet to surface. I’m keen to see them. That was a special time together and it’s my regret that we were not able to get him back down there. He wasn’t able to come with us in 2016 when we revisited the island with some of the original 1976 team so we spoke about doing a more sensible route – the original is no longer maintained by the Department of Conservation. COVID intervened, then life. Then death. But we have some photos and some great memories. Small consolation but consolation nonetheless.
The story of Grant is more than friendship and he wanted his eulogy to reference what made him tick. What had changed and shaped him. He wanted us to know about the transformation that comes from only one place. Grant confessed that even as a young man, had he not been converted that he would have died a drunk. Or, more succinctly he volunteered, “I was saved from being a drunk.” Startling perhaps when you knew his life of moderation but it speaks to the transformation from the very beginning. But it was manifest in other powerful ways. We take reading for granted (no pun) but reading was not something Grant was accomplished at and he would prefer to avoid it if he could. One word was laboured over, followed by the next. Parsing didn’t exist. Yet he surprised even himself when only months after his conversion he was reading passages from Isaiah in public. It didn’t end there – he still reflected years later with some humour how it was that he found himself in the pulpit preaching from Psalm 1. Like so many who found themselves in this situation he was told he was doing it (then shown how) rather than asked.
1 Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked,
or stand in the way that sinners take,
or sit in the company of mockers,
2 but whose delight is in the law of the Lord,
and who meditates on his law day and night.
3 That person is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither—
whatever they do prospers.
4 Not so the wicked!
They are like chaff that the wind blows away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.
6 For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked leads to destruction.
He confessed he regretted losing the sermon notes which he had hung on to for years. But his life was a sermon which bore witness to the reality of this Psalm. He was witness to his own transformation and knew that it was not of his own making. It was God being witness to him, God bearing testimony to his goodness and kindness and power. Blessed is the man who doesn’t walk, stand or sit in the way of the wicked. God took Grant on a different walk and Grant knew it. Every step.
There is a photo I rather like of my brother Frank and sister Julie sitting on the back door step at Glenpark. Primary school and toddler. Just opposite the hut Grant used to call home. But even as toddlers, then primary school kids we were always welcome and a standout memory for us all, but especially my younger siblings was the care Grant took with kids. That is how his transformation played out really – in his care for others, especially those who were small and vulnerable. A protective heart for those who needed protecting. He had a soft spot for us and was alert to our comfort. There are memories of Billy Graham crusades at Carisbrook. Not a ‘house of pain’ in those circumstances but a house of love. Other siblings recall Grant taking them under his wing, giving time to them, keeping them of the cold concrete seats of that stadium. But it was time at his parents place, in his own little hut, on the tractor, in the kitchen. Anywhere and everywhere he had time for the kids. Teaching Sunday School. Youth camps at Pukerau, especially the Easter one. Endless working bees at Waihola’s Christian Youth Camps, when that was a scrub block with wild goats and pigs running amok. His fostering of children came as no surprise, a step which reflected his big heart.
As an aside we shouldn’t overlook his love of cars and machinery. I recall him coming to Australia in our first year there. On a Sunday after church he stood in the street shaking his head at the size of the engine (a small Chevy inspired Holden 253 V8) shunted into a small Torana, then wanted to see what was under the bonnet of the car of every other congregation member. The younger Grant was a serious rev head. He used to have a Valiant Charger. The family had a penchant for Triumph 2000s and whenever I see one I’m taken back to ‘the Whites’. Tractors too. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of those things.
His last message to me two days before he passed was “Good news. First step on the road to recovery.” When I received that message I worried that he was being delusional but even as I worried I realised he knew what he was talking about. The first step to his recovery was made for him more than forty years ago. And it was a recovery from darkness and hopelessness, from lack or direction to purpose, from ambivalence to love. God’s work is not an academic one but a work which transforms the whole person. It transforms the mind. The intellect. The psyche. The heart and soul. Even the body. It’s a complete and total work of grace which is freely given and a work which freely transforms. Recovery of his heart and soul by the master physician. It is indeed good news.