"... the story of growing up in a small, sleepy, rural community just after the Second World War. It is the story of Pakeha New Zealand at its most monoculturally confident, an evocation of innocent yesterdays when kids played marbles seriously and rushed home to hear Dan Dare, Spaceman, on the wireless, when the Cisco Kid serial and Audie Murphy western at the local corrugated iron flea pit were the highlight of the week, when a Hornby train was the most desired Christmas present ... When Pakeha kids grew up indifferent to the larger traditional Maori community around them, when Maori kids were strapped for speaking their first language but Maori songs were taught. This was the was we were and this village was a microcosm of the best and worst of that born again pioneering postwar period of hard yakker and simple pleasures." -- Jacket