Every day was a good day

Through forty years’ service, Senior Constable Mike Graham maintains he never had a bad day.

“Even if you had a bad day, I never really looked at it as a bad day,” he says. “I told myself ‘This is a good day’. That was the way I handled things.”

Born in Whangarei in 1947 and brought up in nearby Springfield Valley, Mike says he was shy and learned to be self-reliant at a young age.

“I didn’t have a lot of friends or playmates. The best toy I had when I was young was a wooden box. You figure that one out.”

Mike spent four years in the Military Police before joining the Ministry of Transport (MOT) on 29 August 1977.

His character was tested within his first few weeks on the bike. “I got taken out at the Takanini interchange when a little old lady in a Morris Minor broadsided me.”

He suffered a serious broken leg and spent months working in MOT communications while he recovered.

Mike credits his ability to adapt as key to staying in the job. “The goalposts were moved for me many, many times in that 40 years and you either went with it or you didn’t go with it, and you just left the job.

“Part of what I enjoyed is the change – how technology has come along. I grasped it, I didn’t fight it. I didn’t say ‘well, I can’t do this’. I just bloody stuck at it until I could understand it.”

One change he welcomed was the provision of counselling for officers attending traumatic events. He says many people from the 1980s and ’90s would still be in Police if they’d had those services.

“Back in those days you got none of that. You were thrown in the deep end and you had to handle it yourself.”

One situation in Manurewa early in his career stands out. “I had a workmate who was always on the same shift as me. We’d been to a very, very bad crash. There was a serious injury where a guy had lain down in the middle of the road just over a hill.

“It was nice and warm on the road because it had been a nice sunny day, and a car had gone over the top of him. That wasn’t very pleasant.”

The next day Mike’s colleague was not at work. “He hadn’t signed in sick or anything. So I went looking for him and found him at his home, in his uniform, lying in a corner, curled up in the foetal position bawling his eyes out.

“I got the bosses on to him and they sorted him out. But he actually left the job because of that. “

Mike says he is very lucky to have the ability to cope, and not only with crashes.

“I’ll handle confrontation if it comes to me but hopefully I can talk people out of confrontation and deal with it another way.” He was only assaulted once - by “some offender going off his tree”.

Mike and wife Jenny, an accountant, farm a 120-acre beef farm in Pakaraka. He says Jenny was his rock, providing the stability which enabled him to do his job.

“She always said I could get up in the middle of the night and go to work and she’d wake up the next morning and find I was next to her, there in bed again.

“She never worried about me. I think that was the stabilising thing.”

The motivation that kept Mike in his role - which took him from Manurewa to Kawakawa, Whangarei and Kerikeri - developed early on.

“In the first instance it was a job - but once you got into it and you saw what you were doing you thought ‘well I’m quite sure I’m saving lives out here’. That’s something that becomes very close to your heart over the years.”

Two days before he retired in April, Mike stopped a man taking his own life. “He was so thankful. I’m quite sure he would have killed himself.”

He says people have told him ‘You gave me a ticket when I was 15 and it was the best thing that ever happened to me’. “That’s what kept me going in the job all these years. And I enjoyed the work. It was a variety of work.”

In 2005 Mike seized the opportunity to join what is now the Commercial Vehicle Safety Team, getting on the road among Northland’s trucking industry.

“The drivers were fantastic, very nice people. You got to know some of them well enough where they would talk to you about their families, and some of the bad days they’ve had, and things like that which was most unusual – especially being a policeman, because most people wouldn’t tell you anything.”

And what does Mike think the drivers would say about him? “They would say to you Mike Graham was always fair. Hard, but always fair.”

He says he will miss his friends in Police and is enjoying discovering old colleagues on Facebook. “Police is a family – really it’s a family for life. Some guys walk away from it completely but I’ll keep track of my friends.”

Mike says he’s happy looking back. “I won’t say it’s a great story. But it’s my life.”