How to live an absolutely worthwhile life without being the slightest bit worthy about it

Sunday column

School days can stay vivid in the memory all the way through your life. The first summer days of high school we filed into our brand new Form 3 class in our brand new uniforms and sat down in a very old room in a very old brick building that would smell refreshingly damp in those first hot summer days and by August would just smell wet.

Our form teacher was Miss Nash, and she had us all at hello. She had energy and vivacity and a winning smile and I swear when she looked you in the eye you could feel her see right into your soul. A born teacher, she just really knew how to read you.

As well as being our form teacher she was our science teacher and as well as that she was our outdoors evangelist. She lived to tramp and climb. Very early on she had a proposition for us: how did we feel about a class trip in the August holidays to Mount Egmont? You bet, Miss. 

Some of us had had some hut life already, some had not, all of us were keen.  We fundraised our way to August and then hoisted our packs onto the bus to Inglewood, first night sleeping on the floor of the high school assembly hall, and then on up to a lodge on the mountain. 

We climbed up into the snow and learned about ropes and ice craft, we hiked around the mountain below the tree line, we cut one of the days short when one of the girls slipped crossing a river and bashed her head which naturally our teacher and her helpers took in their stride because Hazel Nash was on top of it all. It was the best class trip we ever had, even Leanne who got her forehead split open said so.

Here’s a photo. I’m the really tall kid at the back. Or maybe it’s the reverse of that.

And then at the start of fourth form we came back to be assigned to our new form class and there was no Miss Nash. She was already on to other adventures.

I would hear about her occasionally from one of the others who might run into her on a weekend tramp. And then decades went by. I often wondered what became of our cool teacher.

I finally had my answer this week thanks to reading about a hut in the Ruahine ranges that burned to the ground and was able to be reinstated thanks to the generosity of three daughters who funded the project in the name and memory of their mother. One of those daughters was Hazel Nash, and a bit more searching led me onto a Stuff story that gives the sweep of a rich life.

MARTIN DE RUYTER/STUFF

She has been all over, doing good things wherever she’s gone, and you’ll know from watching the video interview that there's no artifice to any of it; she's just really decent, and energetic, and has a great heart.

She’s summited in every continent by the look of it, been taken hostage in Indonesia, been a house mistress at Eton, raised funds for overseas youth charities, launched a health care centre in Kolkata, and most substantially, in the 1980s set up Whenua Iti Outdoors, an outdoor education organisation for at-risk young people that uses outdoor programmes to help them connect to nature and develop self-awareness through that.

You bet, Miss.

She was coming to the end of her time at Eton when Covid-19 landed so she volunteered to help run the emergency accommodation they had laid on for hospital staff needing a place to stay. Always helping. 

So good to see and hear her again. So good, again, to see and hear her push her own determined line. 

She says at Eton she channelled her efforts into bringing a bit of New Zealand egalitarianism into the mix.

At Eton, it seemed like they knew which face to wear to be successful, and [there was] a strong push to make their millions before they were 30. I put all my energy into rewarding them to be who they really were and not putting on the mask. And I think it mostly worked.

That's the person I remember.

She knew who we really were, and she helped us see it.

Every kid should be so lucky.