Cambridge

The morning at Lake Karāpiro stayed with me after I returned—the mist, the damp cold and the young people carrying a shell towards the water. That afternoon, Katherine and I went to St Peter’s School, Cambridge. It was a public holiday and the campus was quiet. There were no footsteps between classes and no bell. We parked and walked slowly along the tree-lined drive. Afternoon light held the roadside trees in patches of red and yellow, as if their colours had been changed overnight. Low classroom buildings sat among grass and trees, neither imposing nor crowded. On the wall of a white building, I saw a sentence in large letters: Be the best you can be. Katherine stood before it for a while. Wind moved through the empty campus and leaves stirred at her feet. “Here,” she said, “it feels more powerful than it would on paper.” In a classroom, it might have been an ordinary school motto. Here, fields and training grounds lay beside it, with Lake Karāpiro—and its crews training at dawn—not far beyond. The words felt less like a slogan than something the place practised every day. We walked on. The fields were empty and the classrooms still. Looking across the grass, Katherine said, “When you’re young, you really should do more sport.” It was not a casual remark. She had always been the student teachers approved of and had followed study all the way to postgraduate work. Much of her time had gone to books, grades and a familiar academic path. Only in middle age did she begin to notice that flexibility, balance and coordination do not remain simply because someone once tested well. A turn, a climb or a moment off balance lets the body say honestly where time has passed. After leaving the school, we drove past stud farms. Black timber fences followed the road; trees were clipped neatly and the avenues ran deep. A sign for Chequers Stud stood beneath the autumn colour. In Cambridge, the word stud needed little explanation.

There was no applause behind those gates. Mending fences, grooming horses, cleaning stables, caring for an animal through illness and recovery—none of this is display. It is daily responsibility. A horse takes years to raise. A child takes years to become a person. The school and farms receded behind us, but the sentence stayed. Be the best you can be. When we left St Peter’s that afternoon, I did not yet know how soon those words would return in another form—and settle on Katherine.