Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home by David Cohen

some of thesame enthusiasm in his boys, even setting up a makeshift ring in the backyard of the Naenae family home and putting his offspring through the fistic paces.
    The seed found fertile ground. Chuckling, Jonathan recalled his years at elementary school in Naenae, where a schoolyard game involved imitating the great heavyweight boxing bouts of the era, in particular the first of the Ali-Frazier encounters, in 1971, an event so drenched in hype that even pre-bout prayers were florid beyond belief. ‘God, let me survive this night!’ Frazier, down on bended knees in his dressing room, loudly beseeched the heavens. ‘God, let me protect my family! God grant me strength. And God … allow me to kick the shit out of this motherfucker.’
    And verily, the Lord attended unto Frazier’s supplication. ‘Nothing beat that fight,’ Jonathan believes. ‘I mean, there you had Ali coming back, trying to win the fight. And there’s Frazier, this huge gorilla, the title-holder. Even long after the fight, we used to re-enact it all in the playground, you know, imitating the fifteenth round where Ali goes down, hits the canvas and gets back up again. It was that big in our psyche.’
    As the son went through the imaginary paces, the father battled his own mental demons; he was running low on money and drinking away what little spare cash he had. Reflecting on the old man many years afterwards, Jonathan finally came to see that he probably was experiencing some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder related to his military service in the Solomon Islands. At the same time, he was clinging to the hope that boxing could yet provide the kind of lifestyle for his young family that working as a painter, labourer and freezing worker hadn’t.
    ‘Actually, he did a whole lot of other things for work as well early on — none of them for very long,’ Jonathan said with a boyish grin. ‘But my father was someone who always had a fighting spirit. You know, not letting anyone beat him, that’s for sure.’ But lifebeat him, right? ‘Unfortunately, yeah, with the war, alcoholism, psychological problems and all sorts of things going on, it was hard — he couldn’t keep his children anyway.’ Plainly Jonathan still retains affection for the old man, a photograph of whom, in a bare-knuckled boxing pose, enjoys pride of place in the hallway of the Manawatu home where he invited a visitor to share his reveries.
    ‘I remember how he used to come to visit me during my time there,’ he said, leaning back in his chair as he recounted the old days with undisguised enthusiasm. ‘He never had a driver’s licence so he used to bike down to the home, in various degrees of intoxication. And they’d go, in a familiar voice, “Mr Foote is here!” and in he’d come, unshaven and worse for wear, carrying confectionery and comics and things. It was nice of him. I mean, to bike down in that stage of intoxication, to come and visit me for two hours and then go all the way back home again, that was something. Don’t you think? I mean, some kids didn’t get any visits at all.’
    Some of the people who did arrive — ‘all sorts of siblings, bogus relatives, furtive girlfriends, old Uncle Tom Cobblers and all’, as one memo testily characterised them — were more problematic. On one occasion a couple of flabbergasted staff members chanced on a local teenager attempting to break in to Epuni; it was for the experience, the boy explained as he was led away — presumably with some sense of gratitude — to spend a night in the cellblock.
    Another memorable occasion involved a ‘special technical tour’ of the residence arranged for 19 tourists from the Japanese city of Nagoya. They descended on Riverside Drive on the morning of Monday, September 14, 1970, with the Japanese wife of a local New Zealander in tow as the group’s spokeswoman and interpreter. She barely got to do any work. Several party members detached themselves from the conducted tour