Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home

by David Cohen

  Thirty years on, the memory of his brief involvement with Epuni Boys’ Home still causes Billy to squirm. ‘I just hated the place, you know, every inch of it — and you know what, it seems like yesterday I was there, because I can still smell it.’ Epuni, where he worked on and off for about six months, ‘just broke my heart’, he added. ‘It was … it was just terrible.’

  At first it seemed so hopeful. The kids took to him easily enough. He taught them about staying fit and fighting well. He drilled them in a martial arts technique known as sticky hands, a method of stopping punches coming on to you while moving and fending away. He got them to do sit-ups and press-ups. And most of all, again, he told them stories about the men who started life on the wrong side of the tracks, and how boxing’s deeper lessons saved their souls.

  ‘They needed stories,’ Billy said. ‘Tell me a story, they’d say, tell me a story. Tell me a story, please. They’d be about to go to bed, but they weren’t letting me go without a story. “You promised me, Billy,” they’d say. “Stay and tell us a story.”’

  So he stayed and told them stories. Jack Johnson and his improbably named girlfriends bulleting in fast cars and getting caught speeding across state lines, for sure, but also the fact that while Johnson was inside he found need for a tool that would help tighten loosened fastening devices and so modified a wrench for the task that would later be patented. Joe Louis hiding his pugilistic ambitions from his mother by carrying his boxing gloves off to music classes hidden inside his violin case — but also the way Louis stood as a symbol of honesty and sportsmanship at a time when boxing promotions were dominated by hoodlums.

  ‘I grew up with that sort of story-telling stuff’cos I had an Irish nana. She used to tell me stories. But the other guys working there at Epuni would always say come on, “Come on, lights out, lights out, gotta go now.” “No,” I’d say, “I’m having some fun with these kids.” But they didn’t like that, even though the kids obviously loved it.’

  Then he started to notice that everything wasn’t quite right with a number of the boys; he suspected they were being sexually interfered with. ‘I’m a street kid myself, you know, and I had a feeling that things weren’t kosher there,’ he said, ‘and so I complained about it.’ Billy shrugged. ‘They couldn’t get rid of me quick enough.’ So he left, and with him went a collection of ideas that if implemented widely enough might have saved a generation of boys and young men, along with the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on maintaining the old system — and the millions of dollars the government might yet be required to fork out if the current raft of lawsuits ultimately prove successful.

  Recently, Billy revisited the newfangled Epuni for the first time in many years, and once again, the institution’s now greatly diminished cohort took to him. ‘When I finished speaking I made an offer to the person now running the place, told him it might be good to bring the boys down here.’ The offer was declined. ‘He said they didn’t want the kids to learn how to box because they might use it to beat them up. I told them that these kids didn’t need to know how to box, didn’t need to know how to beat you guys up. It’s actually the other way round, I told him, because if they learn how to fight, properly, they learn how not to beat people up.’ Billy laughed sardonically at the memory of his most recent rejection. ‘So some things haven’t changed, have they?’

  But of course some things do change too. Billy’s first rejection only spurred the sense of mission that would eventually lead to the largely self-funded establishment of his Naenae Boxing Academy, the site for which he purchased in 2006 from the Salvation Army and where we met. ‘We have gang members walking through the door,’ he said of his typical clientele. ‘First thing I tell them is to lose that look. Get that damn headgear off, shake hands with 10 people — or go home. And get that patch off, too, I tell them, or I’ll make you eat it.’ He would too.

  They usually stay. A good number of Billy’s hundred or so students might on some superficial level be described as failures. Or rather former failures. Many have certainly been on the wrong side of the law. ‘Almost without exception these are tough kids, kids who dare to be different,’ he explained, ‘kids who don’t want to play soccer or badminton or bowls, but guys who want to fight. They want to test themselves. And this is the game — the only game — that sorts them out.’

  So most weeknights you see them assemble in this venue, one of the very few in Naenae never to have been despoiled with graffiti, skipping and hitting bags and thwacking speed balls. Fighting. As three large ceiling fans churn the air, the boys sort themselves out under the pastoral gaze of the main coach, a couple of colleagues and a galaxy of framed photographs of the great fighters, not least Billy Graham during his salad days. But at this point in his career, sadly, Billy is probably fighting as difficult a battle as he ever has in the wider scheme of things: the tastes of the New Zealand chattering-class — the one that constantly frets about youth crime and whelps on about the need for ‘solutions’ — have become dandified over the years, and boxing simply isn’t a dandy’s sport.

  If only they took a little time to see what is being created here. The physical environment that Billy has made for his wards — the spiritual one too — is an inspiring one, immaculately polished on the inside and surrounded outside by dozens of painted rocks displaying the faces of the heavyweight champions of the past century. Hard men on hard stone. As Billy is always pointing out, for all the tall tales of sports writers and fight managers, virtually all the famous heavyweights of the past century or so share one overriding thing: tough backgrounds. Their origins are either dirt-poor like Joe Frazier, or desperate-poor like Sonny Liston, or crazy-poor like Tyson. Some say that Ali never quite fitted that mould, coming as he did from a relatively better-off home in the American Midwest, but Billy dismisses the suggestion with a wave of his still-impressive fist. Ali was one of the world’s most hated people — because of Vietnam, because of the Muslim thing, because he couldn’t really read or write, because of his mouth and the cruelty that too often got the better of it — and if that sounds like Easy Street, said Billy, perhaps you haven’t really thought the matter through.

  Thinking the matter through — which is to say, thinking about life — is the biggest lesson on offer here at the Naenae Boxing Academy. All new entrants receive a copy of Billy’s neatly printed Passport for Success, a collection of the coach’s seven principles for a useful life: responsibility, compassion, consideration, kindness, duty, obedience, honesty and truthfulness. Memorise the lot of them, along with the attached aphorisms, and you get a free annual membership to this unique training initiative and the opportunity it promises.

  For all this talk about the great heavyweights, Billy isn’t in fact a supporter of professional boxing, believing as he does that the amateur side of the sport that he has excelled in best imparts those same important principles that he has since dedicated his life to sharing: the importance of learning new things, looking after one’s body, eating properly, speaking well. ‘Simple stuff really,’ he explained, using oddly familiar words. ‘Like saying please and thank you: little words that open doors in life. Like looking at people. Really noticing them, I mean. Remembering names. Making good on what you say you’ll do.’

  Not to mention the mastery of fear, the real meaning of courage, the need to concentrate energy and find purpose in what one does, about getting up after you’re knocked down and, especially, about being a man. If Joyce Carol Oates was correct when she wrote that boxing has always been a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity, all the more trenchant for it being lost, then this must be all the more powerfully the case for boys and young men whose positive exposure to masculine role models has been limited at best.

  And, finally, those photographs and paintings of the great heavyweights, as we’ve already seen, serve yet another purpose, perhaps the most important purpose of all: they meet a young man’s appetite for stories, the adolescent male’s desire to leap into the imaginary.
It’s an appetite as keen and fundamental as his appetite for food, but which circumstance or neglect has denied for many of the boys involved with this gym, and without which no meaningful future life is really possible. Tell me a story, Billy, they still plead. Only this time he really can, and not just to the assembled youngsters.

  Billy and I had been walking around the venue chatting when we came to a stop next to an old magazine article relating to an instantly recognisable event — the Frazier-Ali fight in Manila — now framed and enjoying pride of place on the wall. What would he say, I wondered, was the lesson a young man might have learned from watching the closing moments of that fight on October 1, 1975?

  ‘It was very hard to see who was ahead by the 14th round, wasn’t it?’ Billy replied after a moment’s thought. ‘Actually, there was nothing in it. Ali was so exhausted physically and mentally that he had put his feet down and said, you know, “I’m not fighting. I’ve had it. I’ve had it. I’ve had it.” And there was Angelo Dundee looking at him and then looking across at Joe Frazier sitting across the ring talking to his own guys — and Frazier was stuffed, too, and he was also saying he couldn’t go on, that he had had enough. Frazier kept saying, “I’m going to die. I’m going to die.” But Angelo Dundee, the trainer in Ali’s corner, is reading Frazier’s lips; he knows what Frazier is saying. So he turns back to Ali and he says, “If you just stand up you’ll be heavyweight champ of the world — just stand up, that’s all it takes.” And he helps Ali up.’

  The old coach let a beat go by.

  ‘So the moral of this story, if you really wanna know, is that you sometimes just have to stand up, sometimes you have to go one more round — and you can be champ.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  What was he reading as the work progressed? That’s what the writer Martin Amis wants to know. All halfway decent books should tell us that, routinely, in the margin or if not at the back, he declares in his memoir. I sort of beg to differ. What the writer was listening to, now that’s worth finding out, and I’m dead envious of my friend Garth Cartwright, who gets to release CDs with each of his books revealing to us just that.

  As I wind up this work in the wee small hours with the record player turned up very loud — at about the same volume they used to pump the music out at Epuni and tuned to some of the same sounds, too, along with some of the stuff I’ve listened closely to over the two years I’ve spent immersed in writing about the same subject — it occurs to me that some readers might be interested too.

  So here it is, a soundtrack for the ghosts of Epuni: Johnny Bristol: ‘Hang On in There, Baby’; James Brown & The Famous Flames: ‘Night Train’; Chicago: ‘Old Days’; The Coasters: ‘Down in Mexico’; DMX: ‘Lord Give Me a Sign’; Deep Purple: ‘Child in Time’; The Fourmyula: ‘Nature’; Jimmy Helms: ‘Gonna Make You an Offer You Can’t Refuse’; Jimi Hendrix: ‘All Along the Watchtower’; Love: ‘Alone Again Or’; The Mountain Goats: ‘Original Air-blue Gown’; The National: ‘Fake Empire’; Freda Payne: ‘Band of Gold’; John Rowles: ‘If I Only Had Time’; The Stylistics: ‘Betcha by Golly Wow’; Donna Summer: ‘Love to Love You Baby’; The Three Degrees: ‘When Will I See You Again’; T-Rex: ‘Hot Love’; TV on the Radio: ‘Lover’s Day’; Mark Williams: ‘Yesterday Was Just the Beginning of My Life’; Stevie Wonder: ‘Superstition’; The Wrens: ‘Happy’. And where would this book be without an excellent album of the same title by one Randy Newman?

  The music was important. Along with the memories of the boxing fights, it helped jog my memory about a certain incident, evoke a voice, conjure up a smell or long-forgotten conversation (the one about Jimi Hendrix being a Maori really did take place just as I described it) about an institution whose inhabitants are in many cases now dead or incarcerated or simply vanished. The understanding reader will appreciate why this makes the subject of residential children’s care so damn challenging to write about for a non-academic readership. The modern journalist’s best friend, the random computer search, sure ain’t no help, either.

  Given the oddity of the exercise, it’s probably unsurprising that this book, too, had its origins in an unlikely setting: a Business Roundtable event, of all things, held one evening a few years ago in Wellington. At the function I shared a table with Chris Trotter and Audrey Young, respectively a political commentator and political editor with The New Zealand Herald, and for some reason we fell to talking about residential children’s care in New Zealand. The conversation took a personal turn. Between them, Audrey and Chris know a great deal about New Zealand political history, but clearly this was new turf for them. Somebody should write a book about Epuni Boys’ Home, one of them said. You should, added the other. I said I’d think about it. A little while later my wife made the same suggestion, at which point I became convinced, and shortly afterwards Random House commissioned the project. You’re holding the result.

  Despite my historical connection with the subject, I figured what would work best would be if I went about assembling the basic material in as detached a manner as possible. There was a practical reason for this. For some time my idea had been to create a sweeping examination at all the various ‘homes’, at least until it became clear that this would require the better part of 20 separate chapters simply to introduce each residence. Much better, it seemed, to concentrate on the one place I knew best and let the wider theme radiate out.

  Perhaps it is a mark of whatever modest skills I’ve picked up during nearly a quarter-century in journalism — or more likely a depressing commentary on the assumption that most of the kids who experienced the system first-hand ended up in rather worse shape than your typical workaday reporter — that virtually nobody I dealt with ever thought to ask whether I had any first-hand experience of residential children’s care in general or Epuni Boys’ Home in particular. Given that my last book made some mention of Epuni, as well as my having once written about the subject for a national publication — which is to say, it was already a matter of public record for anyone sufficiently moved to research the subject — I was happy to leave it at that. But I also hope that the material I gathered has been used as responsibly as anyone I dealt with might reasonably have expected.

  Numerous people assisted in one way or another along the way, and however definitive I try to make a thank-you list, somebody will get missed out, so I apologise in advance for any notable omissions. And I gratefully acknowledge from the start the support of Creative New Zealand.

  I was assisted, firstly, by the former wards I spoke with, along with scores of others whom I was unable to meet but who made their case notes available to me. Of particular note: Matiu Baker, Kelly Blomfield, Les Kiriona, Tyrone Marks, Demetrius Panapa, Arthur Taylor and Keith Wiffin. Especially helpful was one-time Epuni resident Jonathan Foote, whose phenomenal memory of far-off events significantly improved the retelling of several key incidents. My conversations with Jonathan’s brother, Orion, who was never a ward of Epuni but who shares his sibling’s impressive gift of recall (in his case to do with boxing) were also of great assistance.

  I am grateful to the Epuni staffers and Social Welfare employees who agreed to be interviewed: Maurie Howe, obviously, but also Audrey Barber, Geoff Comber, Mike Doolan, Gary Hermansson, Lorraine Katterns, Dave Kelsey, Aussie Malcolm, Denis McLeod and Carol Sedgewick, along with several other individuals involved with the operation who, like a number of former wards, asked not to be identified by name.

  Over a period of several weeks I spent time at the office of Sonja Cooper, reviewing thousands of pages of case notes from the files of former wards who had agreed in advance to my looking at the material. In addition to Sonja herself, I was helped by two of her offsiders, Sarah Mitchell and Rebecca Parker.

  Over at the Care, Claims and Resolution unit of the Ministry of Social Development, Garth Young was unfailingly courteous and prompt in helping me access information from the ministry’s own records and those held by Archives New Zealand. The same, alas, cannot be said for the Ministry of Social Devel
opment’s communications division, which was singularly unhelpful and indeed incommunicative.

  Simon Edwards and Rosemary McLennan, editors of the Upper Hutt Leader and Hutt News respectively, allowed me to visit their offices to currycomb and clip articles from the files of their community papers.

  A number of other people deserve a shout-out just for giving me a great steer, providing an unexpectedly illuminating tidbit of information or some other act of practical assistance: Michael Bassett, Deborah Coddington, Carolyn Henwood, Warwick Johnston, Bernard Lagan, Chris Lamers, Stewart Macpherson, Gordon McFadyen, Teresa McLeod, Kathryn McPherson, Wayne Mason, Belinda Milnes, Paul Newrick, Matt Nippert, Janine Pickering, Kara Puketapu, Carol Selwyn, John van den Heuvel, Nick Venter, Denis Welch and Virginia Wilton.

  I owe a real debt to the social historians Bronwyn Dalley and Redmer Yska (and Mike Doolan) for offering incredibly helpful pointers for my historical sketch of the children’s residential system, the city of Lower Hutt and the prevailing social and political atmosphere of the 1950s.

  Thanks to Nina Fowler, a gifted young journalist who worked for me on some of the early transcriptions and archival research.

  Special thanks to Random House publishing director and ace editor Nicola Legat, whom I was fortunate enough to meet as a magazine editor not too long after I began Grub Streeting back in the late 1980s, and with whom I’ve been lucky to work twice now in her capacity as a highly regarded publisher. I’m also grateful to Nicola’s offsider, the company’s literary evangelist Sarah Thornton, and copy-editor Susan Brierley deserves special mention for her tact and editorial eye along with project editor Alexandra Bishop. Once again it was great to have Catherine Griffiths create the book’s cover design.