Offering the kindness of strangers to others

Let me paint the scene: it is an early summer evening and I am rewarding myself with a glass of wine for having survived the day and having worked a little and having done no lasting harm to man or beast and I am seated in my living room — a name that could apply to any room of the house — when I sense movement.

How alive we are to movement, a legacy of those jungle days when anything that moved was either a threat or a snack.

This movement is not a snack. It is a man going past the window. A bespectacled man, his shoulders somewhat hunched by age, his hair snowy.

He seems preoccupied, as if searching. He does not look the burglar type (no hooped jersey, no bag marked "swag"), nor yet an axe-wielding psychopath. I go to the front door, wine in hand.

The man has gone round the side of the house. At the foot of the path leading up to the front door stands a woman of similar age. She does not look like a burglar either and if she has an axe it is well hidden.

"Hello," I say.

"Hello." Her accent is thickly Germanic. She looks both hot and worried.

"Ve are looking," she begins.

"For the Bridle Path," I say.

"Ja," she says and at that moment the man comes back round the corner of the house and stops short at the sight of me.

"Hello," I say.

"Hello. Ve are looking,"

"For the Bridle Path. I know. Get in the car." And they look at me uncomprehending, just as they always do. For this has happened before.

Lyttelton sits inside a volcanic crater. People arriving by ship look up and think it would be good to climb to the crater rim and look down on whatever might lie on the other side.

In this they are following the example of those who arrived on the first four ships and who forged the Bridle Path. It is a steep climb, and the view from the top is splendid, although I doubt that was much of a consolation to the horses hauling cartloads of Victorian furniture up and over.

To reach the Bridle Path you need to find, astonishingly, Bridle Path Rd. Numerous tourists don’t. Instead they find the road I live on, which is similarly steep.

Up and up they climb till weary of limb and red of face they reach a dead-end. To the left is the driveway up to my place, self-evidently private. But having climbed so far a few of them keep going and find me.

I give them the news that they have climbed in vain and that in order to go up they will have to go back down and then I offer to take them to the Bridle Path by car.

I do so because it’s nice to give, and because it is good to surprise people, and because in my travels I have often received the kindness of strangers and because I like the injection of difference into my day. But above all because it makes me feel good about myself.

I have given lifts to gruff Russian trawlermen, Taiwanese merchant seamen, Filipino cooks from a cruise ship, a back-packing couple from Slovenia, and several older couples like these Germans who have defied the cruise ship stereotype by taking exercise.

So, "come on," I say, "I’ll drive you to the Bridle Path," and the Germans insist there is no need and I say it will be a pleasure and they soon acquiesce, and in the two minutes it takes to drive them there they tell me a little about their lives in halting English and I get a good brief sniff of a big and various world.

Then I drop them off and they rain blessings on my house and I drive away feeling virtuous. That is how it has always happened except once.

Two young Canadian women climbed up to my place one hot afternoon when I was pruning a buddleia.

"We’re looking for the Bridle Path," they said. "Is it near here?" Sweaty and grateful for the chance to take a break, I laid aside my pruning saw.

"I’ll take you there," I said and smiled. "Get in the car."

The girls looked at each other and ran.

• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.