by David Cohen
Certainly, there was nothing to suggest to anyone that the balding, fair-haired housemaster with chubby fingers and slightly pointed ears who presented so well in interviews could be anything but a timely catch in the new classroom block that was completed in 1968. As well as somebody with a working knowledge of how the institution worked, Epuni needed an educator who possessed communication skills and had enough in the way of boyish energy to forge some kind of meaningful bond with those under his supervision.
Calcinai’s teaching style suggested he had been a great hire. He was creative in, for example, the innovative use of vinyl and reel-to-reel recordings, which he used to acquaint the boys with historical events such as the fall of the Roman Empire. To many of the kids, now decked out in Epuni’s new uniform of grey shirt and pants and socks with double yellow stripes, he came across as affable if at times a little intense. What sporting man wouldn’t be?
Calcinai played squash, he was a hiking enthusiast and a talented cook (he would later spend a year running the Bengal Tiger restaurant in downtown Wellington) as well as something of a skilled hand at clothes design. Faced with such an embarrassment of attributes, the only question probably worth asking might have been why somebody so manifestly overqualified would want to come back and live on the premises, devoting all his occupational energy to working in an inauspicious schoolhouse alongside particularly vulnerable young children. Unfortunately this was the one question that nobody thought to ask of the curiously opaque, passionless man who only ever really seemed to come alive when on the subject of children and his own aspirations as a thespian.
SOMEBODY WHO KNEW SONNY LISTON WAS ONCE quoted as saying: ‘I think he died the day he was born.’ So it was too with Leslie Kiriona, and much of his younger experience was spent unsuccessfully trying to find air in the most biblical of settings.
At the time of his birth, in 1959, Les’s parents were separated. Within a year the old man had died. His mother’s health was feeble and she showed little interest in caring for the boy. Times had been hard on Ivy Kiriona. Les had been the last of 10 children born over a punishing 20-year period.
So the people from the government said they would help. Les was taken into welfare care, first as a foster kid living with a local family on the banks of the Whanganui River, in Jerusalem, the hamlet popularised by the cult figure James K. Baxter shortly after the years when Les padded amid its magnificently lush vegetation. It was a spectacular natural setting guaranteed to ‘quicken the dullest intellect into awe and reverence’, as one turn-of-the-century writer put it, resplendent in every shade of green, fringed with thousands of ferns — and, for the young boy, a place shrouded in sorrow.
The family he was placed with there rejected him because, his adoptive parents said, he did not appear to be progressing normally. It was his hearing, they said, he just couldn’t hear properly. A doctor agreed. Indeed, the doctor wondered if the child was in any way normal at all. ‘My feeling,’ he wrote, ‘is that there is some mental backwardness … I certainly wouldn’t be willing to label him as such, but merely to give a clinical impression at the present time.’ Tentative as the diagnosis might have been, it was to have a considerable impact on the boy’s life.
Within a year Les was a fully fledged ward of the state, living in foster care and being attended to by a visiting teacher from the School for the Deaf, who also seemed to share the good doctor’s view of the toddler’s apparently dim chances of ever experiencing a normal life. As his report concluded: ‘Slow development, almost completely deaf. Made no attempt to use his legs at all until well after 15 months old. Mental: retarded.’
The case notes offer no clue how one might make a diagnosis of such a young life without at least using a standardised test or seeking the opinion of a qualified doctor. Indeed, his first educational establishment, Wanganui’s Holy Infancy School, reported that the boy spoke at a satisfactory level for a kid of his age and had settled in pretty well, all things considered, even if he seemed not so adept when it came to socialising. According to one psychological assessment, administered on September 14, 1967, Les may have possessed an above-average IQ. A marked flair for mathematics was also noted.
Still, the boy was also stealing things from school, or rather, perhaps, merely taking things, bringing them home or else giving them away to other kids. ‘Perhaps I was trying to buy their friendship,’ he later said. A report on his file from this period records that he was experiencing difficulties in trusting adults; there had been tantrums, and other behaviours described as ‘a bit of puzzle’.
By this stage Les had lost his birth name as surely as his ancestors had lost so much of their tribal lands. People started calling him Bobby. The teachers called him Bobby, the social workers and speech therapist called him that, too. Perhaps his caregivers ought to have known better, but they were tiring of their diminutive ward. A social worker’s assessment from the time notes that the family no longer felt they understood the boy and simply wanted him off their hands, in order to socially replenish what disruption Les had brought to ‘their high standards of behaviour and standing in the community’.
On May 29, 1969, the decision was taken to send Les to Epuni Boys’ Home — and the place hit him like a punch.
No doubt contemporary psychologists’ casebooks could shed more light on these things, but it would seem reasonably clear that this nine-year-old kid was firstly, and probably nothing more than, a victim of external circumstances. Yet to the authorities he simply exuded a promiscuous spray of disrespect for authority. At Epuni they decided to medicate Leslie with Tegretol, supposedly for epilepsy but also to get him in the right frame of mind for some kind of education.
For the first six months Les was at Epuni he received no schooling at all, and the situation might have continued had Vincent Calcinai not been made aware of his situation and demanded that it be rectified. So concerned was the teacher that he even began spending additional time with the kid. Les let the attention wash over him, taking comfort in the older man’s concern. ‘He took great interest in me from the start,’ he later recalled.
Shortly after he started classes Les was surprised to receive a visit from his new teacher at an unusual hour, during one of the periods of enforced rest when Les was in his bedroom. He flashed his teacher a smile that dimpled his cheeks and squinted up his eyes. The older man didn’t say anything. Calcinai, anger in his eyes, just stood there for what felt like a long time before making off. Nothing else. The next day another visit. Then another.
Les began to worry about what this meant. Then one afternoon Calcinai appeared again. This time, he beckoned for Les to follow him. The teacher turned on his heel and the kid scampered after him. He was led through the car park, into the foyer, through the lounge area’s big rolling door to the dining room and, finally, along the short passageway leading to Calcinai’s bedroom. The smell of dry air. Calcinai waved the boy in. The young teacher followed his favourite pupil into the room, remembering to turn the key in the lock.
SEXUAL MISCONDUCT WAS NOTHING NEW AT EPUNI. In 1963 the institution was briefly closed to new admissions following the discovery of as many as 17 boys involved in various lewd acts, including something described as nocturnal group sex along with other unspecified incidents in corridors and the dining room, ‘with masturbation in the toilets and in the laundry’ apparently running rife. According to an internal memo of the same date, the situation had been ‘a grave one’, although all things considered it may have ultimately been no more shocking than the night-time adventurism at a regular boarding school.
On November 14, 1968, Howe telephoned the regional office to let them know that he had been approached by a 12-strong delegation of boys about ‘what appeared’ to be another episode of unusual sexual conduct, this time involving a staff member on night shift. By the children’s account, they had been awoken at various times by a man who we shall call X, for legal reasons, to go to the toilet, a common enough duty in the case of known bed-wetters, but o
n this occasion extended to other kids who had no known problem. In any event, as Howe pointed out, X’s preferred method of rousing the wards — by touching them on the penis — was hardly by the manual book.
At the other end of the telephone line the director mulled over the situation. Maybe the best thing to do was to call the cops, Maurie suggested. His superiors wouldn’t hear of it. They told him, ‘As it would appear from discussions with the boys concerned that no irreparable damage has been done [and] in the absence of any real corroborative evidence this would only serve to bring opprobrium on the institution and possibly give rise to considerable speculation on the part of the public.’
While there had been no evidence that X had masturbated any of the kids, Howe wrote later, there seemed little doubt ‘that this was his intention’. Each boy had offered a strikingly similar story, after all, and there was some suggestion in at least a couple of cases that this had not been the first time. Yet the wards occupied single rooms; where was the corroborating evidence? It sounded like something best left for Maurie to quietly sort out.
The evening following this decision, Howe was waiting to confront X when he arrived for work. The man was plainly taken aback. A pointed discussion followed. Eventually he admitted to having ‘inadvertently’ touched a number of the boys. It had all been an accident, he explained. So why had he been doing as much even to boys who never needed to be woken up in the first place? Maurie asked. He couldn’t say. Howe sensed the man was ducking the issue. Even so, he reflected as he stood eyeing his employee, was it reasonable to assume this was part of a regular pattern of behaviour?
As far as Howe could see, the man had long carried out his duties in a reasonable manner. Then again, as some staff members had confided to him, there had been evenings when he had shown up for work ‘smelling strongly of alcohol’, if not blind drunk, weaving from side to side along the corridors as he went about safeguarding the institution’s young wards and no doubt chugging back the odd nightcap to boot. That alone seemed to warrant some form of immediate sanction. So he was told to pack his bags and leave, and there the matter was politely allowed to rest.
The decision was reinforced in a confidential memo subsequently sent on November 28, 1968 by the local child welfare officer, Denis Reilly, counselling Howe that any mention of the incident to the police should be made ‘not for the purpose of having an information laid against this man but ensuring the police know of it so that something can be done if future employment is found where offences against children are made easier to commit … I think our obligation would end there’.
As worrying as the implications of the case had been, they were small beer in comparison with the offences committed by Calcinai. Initially he had appeared to get on so well with the kids, although, as residential housemaster Gary Hermansson later remembered, ‘He teased them quite a bit and always ensured he was in the one-up position. And occasionally he would have an outburst, which was obviously kind of a bit controlling. But he was very outdoorsy and would take the boys off to do things as well. So, yes, he stood out as a bit of an eccentric around the edges, but that was all.’
And he was nothing if not businesslike. Among Calcinai’s first decrees was that children in his classroom would no longer eat their lunches in the main dining area, but rather stay at their desks for the meal. Howe liked the sound of that: this was a teacher who loved spending time with his little boys.
At the time, ‘the worst I thought about him was he had his favourites’, Howe admitted with a heavy sigh many years later. ‘And I used to say to the staff that we can’t afford to have favourites because it’s upsetting to the other kids. And I was trying to be a bit more difficult about him taking kids out, which he used to do when he went tramping. So, I guess I had a sort of a gut feeling — but I had no proof.’
Why didn’t he do something? ‘Without proof, you can’t do a damn thing,’ he responded. ‘And no one complained. He had the kids so damn scared, they wouldn’t complain. He thwarted that completely.’
AS A MATTER OF FACT THEY DID COMPLAIN, AT LEAST according to one of his victims. ‘He raped me,’ Les said, pausing for a moment to rub his eyes. ‘It hurt, it hurt, and it made me angry, but what really hurt was that when I said something to the matron, she said, “Children should be seen and not heard.” And that stayed with me, right through to adulthood. Don’t forget, all this happened before my 10th birthday and it really, I mean, it screwed me up. I was always screwed up anyway. I had no sense of belonging. I didn’t know where I was going to go to, who would take me away, how I could become a normal boy again.’ And neither, apparently, did anyone else.
Nevertheless, the warning signs were there for anyone with eyes to see, not least in the growing amount of time Calcinai was asking to spend with Les — and other boys like him, always Maori, always small — outside of class, including weekends away with the oddly subdued child. One weekend Epuni’s deputy principal, Geoff Comber, paid a surprise visit to the area to check on a ward domiciled at a nearby foster home. Arriving at the front door, he was surprised to learn the child had gone camping — and doubly surprised to learn that his camping companion was Calcinai.
Comber felt uneasy. He reported his finding back to the supervising district child welfare officer, who shared his impression that this arrangement appeared somewhat ‘inappropriate’. Yet nothing was to come of it.
Dave Kelsey, who would succeed Calcinai as head teacher, offered a similar recollection of the man whose position he later filled. ‘I remember him coming down one time, it was six months or a year after, I don’t know, and he had a little boy in tow with him. But I didn’t know anything. I thought he was just looking after the kid for a particular reason. I don’t know, I never gave it any thought, I only met him once.’
Might it have been worth asking for a criminal check? ‘No, I don’t think so at all,’ Kelsey said with a shrug. ‘If you had a criminal record, I think that would have had to have been a statement you’d have to make, but I don’t think there would have been. There were no police checks or anything like that. And I think that’s something that should have happened, but we were still relatively naive then about this sort of thing. Nothing had hit the fan at that stage.’
By this point Calcinai knew he was on borrowed time at Epuni, and the months he had spent abusing Les gave him an idea of where he might best head in order to find fresh young Maori boys. As luck would have it, he was offered a teaching position at Pipiriki School, near Jerusalem, the area where one of his last victims had spent his earliest years.
The area also had the attraction of being a hot-button destination for somebody like Calcinai, who harboured ambitions of becoming a playwright, thanks to the newfound presence there of James K. Baxter and a growing band of impressionable followers looking for a slightly easier version of the supposedly spiritual quest that was taking some of their better-heeled peers off in the footsteps of The Beatles to the Himalayan foothills.
In Wellington, Baxter had been a charismatic drunk and a poet with a knack for spouting sub-Blakean verse, excellent qualifications for the success he would soon enjoy as the settlement’s resident cult figure. Relocating to Jerusalem in 1969, he had reinvented himself, as one biographer put it, as a saintly commune leader of uncertain appetites. Not least among these were rampant sexual indulgence and personal uncleanliness.
As many as a thousand pilgrims passed through the commune during its existence. Naturally, given the era, narcotics also featured on the agenda, but here the Christ-figure, as Baxter was explicitly styling himself by the time of Vince’s arrival, had some reservations, cautioning his followers that ‘drug-induced despair is not something I groove on’. Fighting, too, was ‘not okay’ under any circumstances.
For their part, many Maori were bemused. This was Jerusalem, a name that arose out of one of their most profound spiritual experiences of the previous century, and in recent decades the area had also doubled as a haven for the neglected young children who,
until the time of Baxter’s arrival, had been cared for by the local Catholic nuns. The nearby Operiki Pa stood as a stately reminder of earlier battles waged by the Maori. Baxter’s pacifist communitarian effort — an orphanage of sorts for the children of the disaffected white middle class — verged on being a parody of what the settlement historically represented.
Vince was not impressed by what he initially saw in Jerusalem, either, at least among the Maori. He would complain that the native children appeared poorly looked after. He said the education standards left much to be desired. Historically speaking, the latter accusation was particularly offensive. As a number of older Maori pointed out to their unimpressed guest, this was an area where children had once attended the school in a literal state of starvation, during the potato blight of the early 1900s, rather than risk failing.
Perhaps sensing that he might have a fight on his hands, Calcinai resolved to concentrate on the positive — and he surely didn’t need to look far to find it. Baxter was an actor after the new schoolmaster’s own heart, a performer possessed with obvious stagecraft who no doubt also saw in the remote settlement an opportunity to work through his mid-life sexual crisis far from unwelcome outside eyes. The two men became friendly.
